Top Free Hashtag Trackers To Boost Your Social Media Strategy In 2025

Source: Pexels

Hashtags are the road signs of social media – they help users find relevant content, connect with topics they care about, and join trending conversations. 

For brands and content creators, they are a powerful tool for improving reach, boosting engagement, and gaining insights into audience interests and behaviors. But simply using relevant hashtags alone isn’t enough: you also have to track them to gauge your performance and understand the impact of your campaigns.

In this post, we’ll dive into the best free hashtag trackers available in 2025, with options that will give you real-time data, sentiment analysis, and audience insights – all without breaking the bank. While Keyhole will always be the leading platform for hashtag tracking, we’ll also explore a range of other tools to help you find the right fit.

Ready to find the tools that can help you track, analyze, and amplify your social media impact? Read on.

What Makes a Hashtag Tracker Essential for Social Media Strategy?

Key Features to Look For

Before diving into specific tools, it’s useful to know what separates a great hashtag tracker from an average one. The ideal tool should offer:

• Real-Time Tracking: In a fast-paced social environment, seeing results as they happen is essential. Real-time tracking lets you react quickly to viral trends or sudden audience feedback.
• Analytics: Basic engagement metrics like reach, impressions, and engagement rate are crucial to understanding how your hashtag is performing. Advanced tools go further, of course, offering analysis by demographics, location, and even competitors.
• Sentiment Analysis: This feature is incredibly useful because it breaks down whether your hashtag is generating positive, negative, or neutral reactions. It’s ideal for brand reputation monitoring.
• User Insights: Knowing who’s engaging with your hashtag is also important as this helps you identify potential brand ambassadors and influencers who can amplify your reach.

What’s important to understand here is that tracking hashtags goes beyond measuring individual campaigns. Namely, it allows you to understand the bigger picture: this includes which content themes resonate most, where your audience’s interests lie, and how effectively your brand voice aligns with these interests.

It also reveals your competition’s hashtag performance, providing valuable benchmarks. Some tools also provide a visual representation of hashtag insights. Miro’s diagramming templates, for example, offer an intuitive way to map out patterns in your data.

Top Hashtag Tracking Tools for 2025

1. Keyhole.co

Keyhole is one of the most comprehensive social media analytics platforms, providing precise hashtag tracking among a wealth of other metrics. There’s a reason so many brands across a wide variety of industries use it: it allows you to track hashtags, monitor brand mentions, and benchmark competitors, among other things.

Keyhole’s hashtag tracking also offers real-time data, engagement analytics, and of course, competitor comparisons. You can see detailed engagement metrics for each hashtag, including reach, impressions, and sentiment. Plus, it’s easy to spot top influencers (as well as micro influencers) and key users.

How to Use a Keyhole? To get the most from Keyhole, focus on tracking your primary brand hashtags alongside key competitors. Then, use the engagement analytics to identify high-performing hashtags, and pay attention to the sentiment analysis to fine-tune your messaging.

Why does Keyhole stand out? For its simplicity and depth. It’s particularly valuable for small businesses and content creators who need powerful analytics without a steep learning curve.

2. Hashtagify

Hashtagify is another popular tool for discovering trending hashtags and gaining insights into their popularity over time. It’s especially useful for exploring new hashtag ideas and understanding their relevance in real-time.

Its free features cover hashtag popularity, correlations, and identifying top influencers. It’s ideal if you want to track the broader social impact of hashtags and find related hashtags that might enhance your reach.

When to use Hashtagify? It’s ideal when you need to brainstorm hashtag ideas. Whether you’re planning a new campaign or looking to refresh your social strategy, this tool can help ensure your hashtags are relevant and effective.

3. RiteTag

Focused on hashtag relevance, RiteTag offers real-time insights into hashtag performance and suggestions for optimizing them. It’s especially useful for social media posts where you want to maximize reach instantly.

RiteTag’s free version offers hashtag suggestions with color-coded indicators for reach, engagement, and competition. You can also integrate it with your favorite social media platforms, making it easy to apply optimized hashtags on the fly.

This tool is ideal for real-time posting. Whether on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you get immediate feedback on whether a hashtag is hot or overused, which can help you tailor your content for maximum impact.

4. Brand24

Brand24 is more than a hashtag tracker: this is a full-fledged social media monitoring tool with sentiment analysis. For brands focused on managing their reputation, it’s a great solution.

Brand24’s free hashtag tracking provides basic analytics and sentiment analysis, helping you gauge audience emotions around a specific topic. This makes it particularly useful for tracking brand mentions and gauging public sentiment.

Why is it one of the most useful tools for boosting social media presence? Simply put, because it allows you to track mentions and sentiment trends. So, for example, if you’re launching a campaign or addressing a sensitive issue, Brand24’s sentiment analysis can help you stay on top of audience reactions.

5. Social Searcher

Social Searcher is a social media monitoring tool that covers both hashtag and keyword tracking. It’s perfect for brands that want to monitor social mentions around specific topics or hashtags.

The free plan includes hashtag tracking, covering social mentions and user activity. It’s a handy way to keep track of conversations surrounding your brand and industry.

How to use it? Great for tracking the buzz around your hashtag, Social Searcher can help you better understand how people discuss your brand or industry.

6. TweetDeck (X Pro)

If Twitter (now X) is central to your social strategy, TweetDeck or X Pro or is a highly useful tool for tracking hashtag activity on the platform. It’s free, straightforward, and allows you to monitor multiple Twitter streams in real-time.

With real-time stream updates and custom hashtag monitoring, TweetDeck is ideal for Twitter-focused campaigns. It’s perfect for brands that use Twitter as a primary engagement platform.

We can recommend it or Twitter-specific strategies, but not if you need more than this. However, if you’re tracking a trending hashtag or monitoring brand mentions, this tool can help you stay engaged and responsive.

Choosing the Right Hashtag Tracker for Your Needs

When it comes to selecting the right tool, consider what’s most important to your brand. Are you focused on one specific platform, or are you aiming for cross-platform insights? Each tool here has unique strengths:

• Keyhole: Ideal for brands needing in-depth analytics across platforms.
• Hashtagify: Best for trend discovery.
• RiteTag: Offers real-time optimization for individual posts.
• Brand24: Excellent for sentiment analysis.
• Social Searcher: Provides versatile social conversation tracking.
• TweetDeck: Excels in Twitter-specific monitoring.

If you’re operating across several social platforms, think about how real-time tracking, historical data, and sentiment analysis fit into your strategy. For the most effective collaboration in implementing these insights, we recommend checking out JoinBlink’s guide to top intranet software providers, as it covers some of the best modern intranet solutions currently on the market.

How to Leverage Hashtag Insights for a Stronger Brand Presence

Using Data to Shape Brand Voice

Your hashtag tracking results reveal how different audiences respond to your brand. Use this data to adjust your messaging, tone, and content themes. So, for example, if your hashtags spark more engagement around certain topics, you can tailor your brand voice accordingly.

Evaluating Hashtag Trends Across Platforms

Cross-platform analysis also helps you adapt your strategy to different social networks. Track platform-specific trends to ensure your content stays relevant on each site. For instance, a hashtag may perform well on Instagram but fall flat on Twitter, so you can adjust your strategy accordingly for each channel.

Hashtags and Visual Elements: Complementing Strategy with QR Codes and Data Matrix

Including QR codes or data matrix codes in social posts is highly recommended as this adds another useful layer to your hashtag campaigns. How so? It’s rather simple, really: QR codes can direct users to your website, exclusive content, or even contests.

Data matrix codes can be integrated with hashtags to track campaign performance across diverse mediums. For instance, you could link a data matrix code to a behind-the-scenes campaign hashtag for exclusive content, encouraging more users to engage with and share your hashtag online.

What about brands with a physical presence? You can use QR codes as part of your social strategy to bridge the gap between offline and online engagement. For example, you can add a QR code to your event banners, product packaging, or print ads, leading users to a curated social feed showcasing posts with your branded hashtag.

Instagram’s Hashtag Update: No More Following Hashtags

On December 13, Instagram removed the option to follow hashtags. This was done in an attempt to counter hashtag spammers, or individuals who use irrelevant (but trending) tags to their posts in an attempt to get more reach. So now, there’s no option to follow specific hashtags to see related posts in your feed. But – and this is an important but – your posts can still appear on the Explore page, Reels, and in search results if you use relevant hashtags effectively and incorporate your keywords into your captions.

What does this mean for brands and content creators? That your hashtag strategy (for Instagram only) should now focus more on discoverability and less on gaining long-term visibility through followers. Because, remember, while users can no longer follow hashtags, they can still discover your content when searching specific hashtags.

In essence, you should prioritize using hashtags that are directly related to your niche and content, and combine a mix of popular, niche, and branded hashtags to increase your chances of being discovered.

Conclusion

Tracking hashtags can transform your social media strategy from guesswork into a data-driven powerhouse. With tools like Keyhole, Hashtagify, and Brand24, you have access to insights that show which hashtags drive engagement, how trends shift, and what your audience values. Each of the tools we’ve covered has unique benefits, and experimenting with a few will help you find the one that aligns with your brand goals.

Ready to amplify your reach? Start exploring Keyhole.co’s free hashtag tracking features to see how it can refine your social strategy in 2025.

Author Bio

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.