In this blog, we’ll take a look at why you should be treating keywords for social media just as seriously as those used in your regular SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign.
While SEO is an umbrella term for all tactics that help optimise your written content for search engines, here we’ll focus specifically on keywords, and how these can be used to help push your social media posts into the limelight. So, first up…
What is a social media keyword?
When using keywords as part of an SEO campaign for a website, users typically conduct research into what terms their target audience are searching for – and this is no different when it comes to optimising posts for social media.
It can be easy to get keywords in this context confused with hashtags, and their purpose is predominantly the same – to get the content in front of the right audience. But what’s the difference between the two?
Fundamentally, hashtags are only effective on social media – they don’t make much of an impact outside these platforms. A lot of the time, hashtags are short; for example, in 2024, the top 3 most popular hashtags* on Instagram were:
1.#Photography
2.#Love
3.#Art
Now, given that Instagram is a platform that is heavily focused on sharing #photography, the first hashtag makes sense – but given that billions of posts will use this, it’s easy to see how your content can quickly get swallowed up. This isn’t to say, of course, that hashtags aren’t useful – this tool can be a great way to index your post into a category, meaning it will then be discoverable by anyone who goes searching for that specific term. The more specific you can make your hashtag (for example, “#PhotographyinCheshire” instead of simply “photography”), the more likely it is your post will be placed in front of your desired audience.
Hashtags are generally best placed towards the end of the post, or a select few placed into the main body of the description – too many will look spammy, and may turn your reader off.
Keywords, on the other hand, don’t come with this aesthetic issue. Visually, they appear naturally within the sentence – so instead of #PhotographyinCheshire, it would simply be phrased as “photography in Cheshire”, which can be placed into the body of the description as normal.
Why is this important?
Using keywords as well as hashtags in social media posts means they are discoverable by a wider audience. Those using a search engine like Google are unlikely to search a term using hashtags, but long tail keywords like “photography in Cheshire” or “professional photographer in Cheshire” can bring up social media accounts in the SERPs (search engine results pages) too.
This means your post will be discoverable from both angles – within the social media pool you are using, and the wider sea of Google.
If you need help optimising your content, why not reach out to the team at Engage Web today?
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