Q: What is hashtagify.me?

Daniele Mazzini:

hashtagify.me is a hashtag search/discovery engine. It’s free and gives you some basic analytics data too. It allows you to find which hashtags are the best ones for your goals. Cybranding’s Hashtag Intelligence is the paid hashtag tracking and analytics option. Hashtag Intelligence lets you get very detailed data and analyses about the hashtags you’re interested in – either because you are doing a campaign yourself, or because you want to piggyback on somebody’s else campaign.

Q: Let’s hear the backstory of how this all got started.

Daniele Mazzini:

In 2011, I had a different day job and a side project. The side project had a website, and I wanted to find ways to promote it through social media – this is how I discovered Twitter hashtags. Hashtags allow you to conduct and find interesting conversations on a topic on Twitter, so I went out looking for hashtags I should use to promote my new website… but I didn’t find any good way to do so! I found this world fascinating, and I came up with an idea for a useful and cool way and visual way to do hashtag research. This is how the first version of hashtagify.me was born – as a hobby project son of a side project. Lots of people found my free service useful, and hashtags started becoming more and more important. In 2013, I decided to try and create a business around this, so I improved hashtagify.me, made it more professional-looking and added features, and then created a paid, in-depth analytics solution for marketers. You can visit cybranding.com and take a look. 🙂 Now we’re growing and I’m looking for bigger funding.

Q: Do you have any very visible ambassadors? If so, who?

Daniele Mazzini:

Well, some of our users are well-known on social and some of them like to talk about us, like Ann Smarty, Kim Garst, Kristi Hines, Kimberly Reynolds, Brandon Schaefer, and others.

Q: Oh! I know Ann fairly well as well as the other names too. So what are some common misconceptions about your technology? As in, people thinking it will do X but it really doesn’t. In other words, where the user was mistaken.

Daniele Mazzini:

The biggest misconception is that we will automatically add hashtags to your tweets. This is something we don’t do, because it has a very high spammy risk. Another one is that sometimes people think we will do the analysis for them, but right now we only give a tool to do that – it’s up to you to use it. But, we’re also thinking about a project – a “hashtag university” to give suggestions and guidance.

Q: Let’s talk strategy. What are good ways to use your technologies?

Daniele Mazzini:

Let’s start with small businesses. Small businesses, especially if they have an internet presence, can benefit a lot by using hashtags. Hashtags are one of the most powerful ways to get yourself known without spending a lot. There are two basic strategies I advise small businesses to use: One is to find relevant hashtags in their field/niche and then create a list based on those. Then use them in relevant tweets. For example, if you have a video editing service, you should find out which hashtags are used by those interested in that field, and every time you have something interesting to share, use 1-3 hashtags that are relevant. And here’s how we help with that: Our technologies allow you to find which hashtags are both relevant and popular enough. You start with some keywords you think will interest your target audience, then you search for those in hashtagify.me to see how popular they are, what their trend is, and which other hashtags are related to them.  You can further narrow down to come up with a list of anywhere from 5-15 hashtags, depending on your field. Keep them in mind and use them strategically.

The second strategy is: When you’ve found your relevant hashtags, you should try to understand who their top influencers are, and connect with them! Learn what they write about, retweet them, engage them. Also, try to find out which influencers aren’t too big and therefore out of reach for you.  Add value to the conversation around the hashtag, keeping a special eye on the top influencers! This will require time, but it can have great payoffs. One of the best uses of our pro tool, Hashtag Intelligence, is that it makes it much easier to find and understand the influencers.

Tracking some specific hashtag campaigns, either by you or your competitors, is another use case, but this usually doesn’t apply to small businesses. Launching a hashtag of your own usually requires too many resources.

Q: Does your technology work on Facebook? I heard Facebook uses hashtags now, as well as Instagram. I have accounts on both Facebook and Instagram but I don’t use those platforms much at all and have never hash tagged anything on them.

Daniele Mazzini:

Hashtags are VERY useful on Instagram, but that’s not so true on Facebook at the moment. For now, we only analyze hashtags from Twitter as we continue to work on adding Instagram and Facebook. But for the most part, what’s trending on one platform will often be trending in others. So you can still use hashtagify.me to find relevant hashtags for Instagram. Of course, there are some hashtags which are specific to one platform, such as Twitter chat hashtags. Those don’t belong on Instagram. But there’s a lot of cross-pollination and interesting usage between all the platforms. For example, #igers, which means “Instagrammers” has a Twitter popularity score of 63 out of 100. If you want to see what’s popular now, visit hashtagify.me/popular/en

This has been interesting. Thanks so much Dan.

Here’s a promo video about the pro tool: