There are a variety of social media tools available that help you to accomplish nearly any of your online marketing goals. Some are free, and some are paid. We’ve come across several tools over the years that have helped us immensely and we’d like to share a few of these with you as we enter 2016. First and foremost, we’d like to introduce you to RiteTag. This online application has a small monthly fee and touts many features, but we LOVE the feature that helps to find the BEST and most effective hashtags to use.

RiteTag will connect to your internet browser, so if you use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite, it will work seamlessly within that application. When you’re crafting your hashtags, RiteTag will automatically color code them depending on the level of popularity:

• Green: tweets with this hashtag have a high chance of being discovered
• Blue: Tweets with this hashtag can be discovered in the long term
• Red: hashtag is too popular, tweets with this hashtag will be buried in the search results
• Gray: hashtag hasn’t been used recently

It will also give you hourly analytics about each hashtag. For example, the hashtag “#fresh” contains these statistics:

• Receives 121 unique tweets per hour
• 62 retweets per hour
• 122,133 potential hashtag views per hour

So you can use this app to determine if a particular hashtag is going to be effective for your brand.

RiteTag is a paid platform, but it will give you a 30 day free trail and their base plan is only $10/month. We would recommend signing up and trying out the free trial to see if it is something that would be valuable for you.

Try pairing RiteTag recommendations with the 2016 Social Media Content Calendar dates and tips for super effective content planning!