The importance of having an active social media presence for businesses becomes greater and greater every day. Nowadays, many consumers, especially the younger generations, actually favour social media platforms over traditional search engines, such as Google.
This statement is backed up by a survey carried out by Hubspot, showcasing that 31% of consumers regularly use social media to search results for their queries. Although this is not the majority of overall internet users, this statistic highlights a huge shift in user behaviour, which is important to note and start to implement if you have not done so yet.
With social media platforms and their algorithms becoming easier and quicker for social media users to find relevant information on, it points out the opportunity for businesses to make their presence on such platforms known. Remember, simply creating good content is not always enough. To make sure your social media accounts and content creation efforts achieve the best results, it's important to understand what social media SEO is, and how it helps search engine algorithms distribute your content to your target audience.
What is social media SEO?
Social media search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to the practice of optimising your social media profiles and content to improve your visibility and discoverability across relevant social media platforms. While traditional SEO focuses on optimising your website for search engines like Google, social media SEO extends that optimisation to your social media channels, allowing you to attract more organic traffic, engage with a wider audience, and grow your following of your target audience.
What are the benefits of applying SEO to your social media content?
By implementing SEO strategies within your own social media content, you unlock the potential to reach a wider audience, including those who may not yet be aware of your brand's existence. This presents a powerful opportunity for growth, as increased visibility leads to better brand awareness, ultimately providing you with the chance to attract more of your relevant audience.
On top of that, by following the best social media SEO practices within your captions and other pre-posting processes, you put yourself in a greater position to be discovered on search engine result pages. Your high-quality and engaging content deserves to be seen, so ensuring the last steps of posting are done right will give the social media algorithms more information about your target audience, helping it to show it on their feeds.
Top 3 social media platforms that require social media SEO:
1. TikTok
TikTok has now evolved from just being a place to share short-form videos into a social platform that acts as an effective search engine. EConsultancy’s data shows that a staggering 40% of young people now choose to use social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to search rather than Google.
This further highlights the importance of leveraging this changing user behaviour between younger generations and establishing your brand presence on this popular social media platform. By creating valuable content around your brand, showcasing behind-the-scenes highlights, as well as making informative videos (whether relevant) about your location, products or services, you will attract more of your ideal audience, who may have not found you otherwise.
To fully optimise your content for TikTok, we recommend utilising the app’s features, like on-screen text and closed captions, as well as the video caption (description) alongside relevant hashtags. By filling out these parts of your video with relevant information about your content, TikTok’s algorithm will understand it better and show it to relevant audiences and keywords.
We have put together a useful list of what all the different social media terminology means here.
2. Instagram
Similarly to TikTok, Instagram is also a popular place for people to research. According to information provided by Statista, about 46% of Gen Z travellers admit that Instagram influences their travel decisions. So if you do not currently have a presence on this social media platform, it’s time to change that. By sharing engaging content with your target audience, whether it’s through Instagram reels or pictures, you have the potential to reach new audiences that are ideal for your business and brand.
To increase your reach even more by implementing social SEO, we recommend utilising the elements already provided by Instagram. Such could include relevant keywords and hashtags within your content captions, however, it’s important to highlight that they need to be included within the caption, as by placing them in your comments section they will lose any effectiveness. On top of that, Instagram also allows you to edit your alt text, which not only improves your post's accessibility but also benefits image SEO.
3. Facebook
Facebook, which just like Instagram is owned by Meta, also puts a strong emphasis on high-quality content that’s valuable to your audience, as well as easy to understand for the algorithm. Facebook rewards posts with informative captions and high-quality visual content, so make sure your Facebook posts are not only reflecting your brand visually but also are written in a way that will engage your audience and inform the algorithm what your message is about. Lastly, Facebook puts a strong emphasis on compliance with their guidelines, which if not followed, can cause your post to be suppressed or removed.
Tips on How to apply SEO to your Social Media
- Don’t overlook your captions, as they are not only great at engaging your audience, they also provide search engines with relevant information that helps them understand your content better. This in return ensures the algorithm shows your content to the right people.
- Utilise hashtags, which are relevant to your content, as they help the algorithms to understand what your content is about.
- Link your social media profiles on your website, and link to your website from your socials.
- Don’t be afraid to utilise your website content on your social media profiles. By resharing blogs, images and copy from your own website to your socials you get to save time, as well as share this informational content with people who actively follow your socials, but don’t necessarily visit your website.
- Stay up to date with regularly released updates on social platforms, and apply those best practices to your own strategy and activities. To make it even easier to stay on top of such changes that can affect your social media SEO strategy, subscribe to our newsletter, and get relevant news delivered directly to your inbox.
Overall, social media SEO is a powerful tool to further improve the chances of the content that they spent their precious time crafting and polishing, to take off. By providing algorithms with relevant information and telling them what the social posts are about through using features provided within your social media platform of choice, you can reach new audiences, who currently may not know you exist.
Take the time to ensure that your content is not only high-quality but the pre-posting processes are optimised and follow the best practices of the platform.
Our team of social media experts at Big Bear Creative have the skills and experience to leverage the full potential of social media SEO and elevate your business's online presence. Get in touch with us today!
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