There are a number of effective ways to monitor response with social media. Today I’m feeling inclined to talk about tracking Twitter hashtags.

With NWF’s Wildlife Watch program we encourage people to #NWF every time they see wildlife, this in turn goes on our website.  It’s been a long-term campaign with random spikes in interest and observations.

I’ve decided to talk about two of the tools that I’ve found most useful. While I used to rely primarily on hashtags.org that site seems to have fallen to the wayside by other sites that track more reliably and with interesting data.  Here are my two choices!

What the Hashtag?! – this serves as a user’s editable encyclopedia for hashtags – so if you have a hashtag you want to track– this is one of my favorite options. Not only can you RSS the results– but it gives you helpful information such as how often the tag is used each day and it details who the top ten users are. This data is very helpful if you are tracking either an event or a long-term campaign!

Twazzup: This tool is more visual and helps me see the wildlife sightings in greater detail (it allows me to see twitpics and photos). It also links off to recent articles where NWF is mentioned. Overall– it’s a great visual representation of what #NWF is doing and even shows the large number of contributors over time (it tracks for more than a week– unlike WThashtag).

While these are just two of the tools I use– they are by far my favorite. I’m interested to know what tools you couldn’t monitor without–