Most social media conversations are organic and unstructured: hashtags help organize and categorize them, creating a sort of user-generated tagging, which helps observers discern patterns and easily find posts with specific themes or content.

That’s why today we’re bringing you an entire section that’s dedicated to visualizing them on TRAC, in a separate section from Top Keywords. 

This also happens to be our TOP VOTED feature on Collaborate!
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Being able to visualize hashtags separately from keywords is helpful given that hashtags are often more succinct. This gives users another lens to understand conversation, sentiment and emotion. So whether you’re reporting on a social campaign you carried out for a client, or trying to get a sense of how the conversation has evolved in an important topic, hashtags will help you uncover some useful insights. 

Similar to the Keywords and Topics sections on TRAC, you’ll be able to see hashtag performance in the Treemap, Stream, Wordcloud, Bundle and Segments graphs. 

Let’s take a look at each one of them in more detail. 

You can use the Treemap graph to see the most common hashtags and frequency of their use within specific social channels. Uncover how people tend to use certain hashtags more frequently depending on the channel they are on, and see how those hashtags over-index for specific channels. 

Use the Stream graph to find emerging hashtags and see how their frequency of use changes over time. This is a useful visualisation that helps you gauge what's popular and what's fading over time. 

Use the Word Cloud Sentiment graph to understand the positive or negative opinions associated with each hashtag. The size of each hashtag in the word cloud represents the volume of conversations with that hashtag. As anywhere in the platform, Red = Negative, Gray = neutral, and Green = Positive.

Wordcloud: Emotion

Use the Word Cloud Emotions chart to understand the emotion associated with each hashtag. Different colors again signal different emotions, and the size of each hashtag in the word cloud depicts the volume of conversations associated with that hashtag.
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Use the Bundle graph to uncover the connections between hashtags, and how they are frequently used in conjunction with each other. In the above example, you can see that when people talk about #workingfromhome, they also talk about this alongside #nationalpuppyday. 

This chart provides a network analysis of your top hashtags, clustered by how well connected they are and their frequent occurrence in the same context. Related hashtags are grouped together into distinct segments, and the clustering algorithm we apply determines the relevance and importance of each hashtag within a given segment, helping you uncover the dominant themes in a conversation. 

So, there you have it! Five different ways to understand hashtag performance in your search. Any questions, then hit us up via the in-app chat, and for any feedback on this new feature, feel free to add a suggestion on Collaborate.
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