The advantages of altmetrics — the diversity of dissemination channels analysed, the speed of getting data, the openness of methods, and the ability to measure impact beyond the ‘scholarly realm’— could be seen as especially promising for fields that currently are difficult to study using established bibliometric methods and data sources. This paper reviews the benefits of using altmetric methods to analyse the impact of research in the humanities and tests some of the most common altmetric tools on a small sample of publications and authors. The findings indicate that many of the problems identified in research on the use of bibliometrics on the humanities are also relevant for altmetric approaches. The importance of non-journal publications, the reliance on print as well the limited availability of open access publishers are characteristics that hinder altmetric analysis. However, this study provides only a few examples and further studies are needed in order to examine the possibilities that altmetric methods offer.