Social media provides a perfect playground for marketers in all of the industries to research, communicate with and nurture their customers. There’s a huge amount of noise and data however, generated by billions of people on different social media channels, each of them demonstrating a unique behaviour. The ultimate goal of all analytics and internet monitoring tools is to allow marketers to easily gain valuable customer and business intelligence, and effectively “listen” to how their brand is performing and being able to curate its image in real-time. Hashtago, based in Kiev, Ukraine, provides a powerful tool which delivers mentioned values by segregating social media activity using hashtags.
Hashtago has developed a technological platform for social media monitoring and analytics, which actively utilizes data mining techniques and clusterizes social data across multiple platforms, taking hashtags for the basis. Business intelligence is then displayed and summarized on the dashboards, allowing marketers to quickly navigate and respond to trends and customer needs. Currently the team focuses on taking the technology to the new level with what they call “external hashtags”. Using the plugin, marketers would be able to instantly create custom dashboards out of every hashtag on the internet. The ultimate goal of the platform is to create more accurate customer personas using the data collected across different social media channels and then analyzed together.
The idea of taking #hashtags as the basis for data clusterization was developed through a series of pivots and iterations, and proved itself to be viable both technologically and from the business perspective. It’s intuitive for marketers, provides an understandable way for them to work, and utilizes a highly distinctive and massive part of content generated on social media, which directly evidences location, customer tastes and preferences.
Hashtago currently has about 80 paying customers, mostly agencies and large brands. The potential market is global, with 40% of current customers coming from Ukraine, and others from Baltic states, USA and Britain. It was one of the first startups in Ukraine which managed to raise seed funding from US based VC fund – Imperious Group, and is planning to seek round A funding soon.
