Businesses that achieve a large part of their profit through online sales have started focusing on social media marketing. For your marketing to be effective on social media or anywhere else, you will need to research and find out what users are interested in. Thankfully, there is a significant overlap between the behavior of users on social media and marketing keywords that you can use to your advantage. Let’s look at four ways to use social media for keyword research and improve your marketing efforts and organic website traffic.
What are keywords?
Before we dive deeper into how social media fits into keyword research, we’d like to explain what keywords are and why they are essential for any website. Keywords represent the ideas and topics covered on your website and its content. However, in SEO-speak, keywords represent the common phrases users enter into their search engines. If your website ‘hits’ the right keywords, then Google and other search engines will bring up your pages with the relevant keywords when delivering results to users. Therefore, hitting the right keywords will generate more organic traffic and leads to your site. However, finding which keywords are popular takes a lot of effort, but there are a few tricks that might help.
So, what are 4 ways to use social media for keyword research?
1.) Get real-time keyword information
Social media isn’t the only way to do keyword research. One of the most widespread keyword research tools is Google Analytics. Unfortunately, Google’s service comes with a bit of a delay. The typical latency isn’t too bad, and for the most part, it’s usually up to two days. However, if you are trying to optimize your campaign and get immediate feedback on the test copies you are using – those two days could represent the precious time you can’t afford to waste. In these situations getting real-time feedback can tell you which keywords are trending. This kind of information can let you stay a couple of steps ahead of your competition at all times.
There are plenty of social media scrapers that you can use to get keyword information. Different social networks might even have built-in tools that can provide you with additional insights. It’s always advisable to look at more than one social platform since you better understand what users are searching for. Data aggregation can help you get more accurate information, and social networks are a data goldmine. This can also prove to be extremely valuable for small businesses. Due to the low search volume for specific niche phrases, small or local companies might have very little use for Google’s tools.
2.) Facebook can teach you a lot about user behavior
Most businesses already have a pretty good idea of who their target audience is. However, Facebook’s ad targeting options can provide you with a wealth of new information. Users on social networks are prone to oversharing and posting personal information. Don’t worry; Facebook doesn’t let any of that information go to waste. They collect everything and make detailed user profiles which can be later used for targeted advertising.
When you run an ad campaign on Facebook, you will be given targeting options. The amount of control you have over who sees your ad is incredible. While Facebook on its own doesn’t give you a keyword research option, you can use the targeting options as a starting point for your research. The interests of users that Facebook gives you as part of its audience segmentation can guide your keyword research and other marketing efforts.
3.) Explore Twitter’s trending topics
Twitter has gone to great lengths to keep the conversation going between its users. Whenever a subject starts generating broader interest, Twitter’s algorithm quickly picks it up and features it as a promoted topic. You can check out what’s trending for inspiration for your keyword research, but you should also browse the user comments. People love voicing their opinions and engaging in conversation on Twitter threats, which can give you even more information. Even better is that the conversation moves in real-time, so you won’t have to wait for analytics software to compile the data.
The best place to start your search on Twitter is by looking through the ‘explore section.’ Here you will see a selection of topics that are trending and also a section that is selected for you. Although hashtags are still in use, the search functionality has been significantly improved, making this one of the best ways to use social media for keyword research. Besides searching for trending topics, Twitter’s Analytics platform can also provide valuable insights. However, with a large amount of information available, you can also combine elements for better results. For example, you might need to connect CRM software to your social media for this to work. This will let you interact with customers in real-time regardless of the platform.
4.) Use auto-complete on networks like YouTube
Multiple platforms have auto-complete options available; however, YouTube has become a content creation powerhouse which is also great for developing marketing strategies. You will get a good feeling of what users are searching for and what kind of content is popular. There will be some keywords that you should exclude since YouTube has an inclination towards a younger audience. A great way to get long-tail keyword suggestions from YouTube is to type out part of a search term and then add an underscore character “_” to the end of your phrase. This will give you a list of the most searched queries, including your chosen phrase.
In conclusion
Social networks are where people gather and where most of the marketing content gets posted. If you know how to keep an eye out for what’s trending, you can get valuable information on your audience and what they are interested in. Now that we’ve explained four ways to use social media for keyword research, you can start creating the basis for your SEO content and marketing campaigns.
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