Are hashtags part of your brand’s marketing plan? Hashtags work on multiple social networks — but until recently there was no easy way to search them on all of these platforms. Enter #HashAtIt.com; the site bills itself as “the first social media search engine that gives users a way to gather information on any metadata tags (#hashtags) from popular social networks.”
Users can search a single hashtag and collect all the relevant posts and status updates, worldwide, from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram — in realtime. It’s a place for big or small brands to watch how their hashtag campaigns are playing out, and also a way to follow breaking news stories — social networking platforms like Twitter are known for breaking news before major media outlets.
Founder Laurie Paolone spoke about testing #HashAtIt when the story of Paul Walker’s death broke out; the site showed a video of the crash six hours before it aired on a large news media site. “We realized that our platform could give people the results they’re looking for as-it-happens, without any biased censorships,” said Paolone.
The site features customizable #hashtag boards, created and tailored by users. The free service gives users the ability to:
- craft their own hashtag boards
- mute the posts they find irrelevant
- embed their boards on their personal social networks, blogs, or websites
- see results for each hashtag on all platforms, or on a single platform
Other hashtag monitoring sites include hashtags.org, which only tracks specific hashtags on Twitter, and #Tagboard, which is the closest competitor to #HashAtIt.com. In general, #Tagboard is focused on collecting posts around a specific hashtag on an ongoing basis, where users pay more to gather more information; #HashAtIt.com is more about hashtag search, with the added benefit of creating a board to keep or share mentions around a certain hashtag.
We’ve listed a few other differences between the two:
- #HashAtIt.com users can share any of the results from a hashtag search to other social media platforms directly from the post; #Tagboard users can respond to or share a post only within the social platform that the post came from
- #Tagboard is free for basic use, but then has a variety of pricing for ‘plus,’ ‘pro,’ and ‘enterprise’ levels; #HashAtIt is free for all users
- #HashAtIt offers an embed code for the #hashtag search board so that users can put it on their own website, blog or article
Given that hashtags are now a mainstream source of conversation on social networks, keeping track of all hashtag mentions in one place is valuable for average users as well as for brands. How does your brand search for hashtag mentions and follow hashtag campaigns?
