The foundation of search marketing is built on keywords. Search marketers know that conducting continuous keyword research and keyword analysis is critical to achieving success with organic and paid search advertising.
But conducting and implementing keyword research is also highly effective for social media marketing.
Whether your target audience is sharing content on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, your social media marketing efforts should start with determining which social media keywords your audience is using.
To be more specific, conducting keyword research for social media enables you to discover the needs and wants of social communities by:
- Tracking popular and trending topics on Twitter and other social networks
- Determining search query frequency
- Gauging market interest for products or services
- Identifying demand for keywords
- Better understanding user intent
- Discovering relevant points of engagement
By researching and identifying social media keywords, you gain a much clearer picture of how to construct and communicate your message effectively.
Applying this level of keyword insight to all your social media optimization efforts (from optimized video, to image tagging, to social bookmarking, to targeted tweets) gives you the maximum “pull” and value out of your social media marketing plan.
1. Use Facebook Ad Targeting Options for a Peek into Audience Behavior
Even if you know who your target audience is, there’s a good chance you don’t know everything about them.
The social platform is where most of us share details about our lives, our jobs, what shows we like, what topics we are interested in, and what products we buy.
One of Facebook’s greatest strengths is its incredibly granular and sophisticated targeting options.
Advertisers and search marketers can target their prospective audiences based on hundreds of different criteria, including demographic data, behavioral patterns, wider online interests, as well as layered segmentation combining any of the data points available.
Conducting keyword research for Facebook in the traditional sense isn’t actually possible. Facebook doesn’t offer keyword-level targeting, nor any built-in keyword research tools. Instead, think of Facebook’s audience profile data as the starting point for your keyword research.
Facebook offers incredibly granular audience targeting based on hundreds of parameters, including demographic data, life events such as having a child or getting married, specific hobbies and interests, as well as wider topical interest areas.
This allows you to use interest- and demographic-based data points as the first step in your keyword research for Facebook.
For example, if your business sells health products such as vitamin supplements, you could target mothers who are interested in yoga and similar audience segments, as this demographic is likely to be interested in health-related topics and products in a broader sense.
Given the strong correlation between interest targeting and high commercial-intent keywords, Facebook’s granular audience segmentation options are an ideal starting point for your Facebook keyword research workflow, whether you’re an advertiser, a search engine optimization specialist, or a content marketer.
Facebook gathers all that data for ad targeting. However, it can also be used for keyword research and finding related topics. Using Facebook targeting options, you can learn about your audience’s:
- Location.
- Age.
- Gender.
- Interests.
- Relationship status.
- Languages.
- Education level.
- Where they work.
Tip: Facebook groups are another great source for key terms. Look for “popular topics” in industry groups for keyword ideas:
2. Dive Into Twitter’s Search Functionality
Ah, Twitter. Home of bite-sized content, breaking news, and some weirdness, too. Unlike other platforms, where content might stay fresh for several hours (or even several days), Twitter trends move in almost real-time.
It makes Twitter ideal for finding timely key terms. To find interesting topics, head to the “explore” section.
You’ll see several options – pay special attention to the topics under “for you” and “trending.” These are topics that people in your area and industry are talking about.
The one drawback to this strategy is it isn’t as useful if you aren’t already active on Twitter. If you are, however, Twitter is a treasure trove for topic ideas and long-tail keywords you can use in SEO.
In recent years, Twitter has refined its internal search algorithms to make it easier to find relevant content on the platform. Not so long ago, hashtags were considered vital to Twitter, offering one of the few ways to track conversations as they happened in real time.
Today, Twitter hashtags are still used, but Twitter’s increasingly accurate search functionality means that you can now search for any keyword or phrase, regardless of whether people are using dedicated hashtags or not. This can be very handy for identifying trending topics on Twitter.
Twitter’s internal search functionality has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, but it’s far from the only method of keyword research at your disposal.
Twitter’s Analytics platform offers invaluable insight into how keyword data can be leveraged for greater reach and higher engagement. Similarly to Facebook, Twitter’s strength lies in its audience data.
3. Search Instagram Hashtags to Discover Relevant Content
What started as a way to share photos of dogs and avocado toast is now a bonafide search engine thanks, in part, to hashtags. Head to Instagram and search for key terms you want to target, then take a look at the other hashtags users add to posts.
Let’s say you want to post about SEO content. Search for #SEO, then look at hashtags recent posts are using. The first few posts were spammy, so you skipped those. A few posts in, you found one using these hashtags:
Jackpot! It’s raining tacos and burritos!
Tons of long-tail and related key terms you can use for content creation, SEO targeting, even paid ads. Searching each of those hashtags will provide me with even more keywords.
You can also use the autocomplete feature for keyword research. Let’s say you want to find content related to B2B marketing.
Instagram kindly shows me other topics users are interested in. You can use those hashtags in my Insta content to increase my reach – or add them to my long-tail key term list.
For one, it’s a primarily visual service, which leads some marketers to mistakenly assume that keyword research is of little value to Instagram marketers. This is not the case!
First of all, Instagram SEO is a thing!
Secondly, unlike Twitter, Instagram relies heavily on hashtags in terms of content discovery. Aside from attractive visuals, the top-performing Instagram posts all share one common characteristic – an abundance of hashtags.
This lets users find content that’s relevant to their interests and share it with their followings. This means that although the platform relies on hashtags more so than other social media services, keywords form the basis of content discovery on Instagram.
Since Instagram also lacks a dedicated keyword research function, hashtags will form the basis of your initial keyword research workflow.
Fortunately, accepted best practices for maximizing visibility of Instagram content allow for the use of many hashtags in a single post – something that may be possible, but frowned upon by users of other social media sites.
This means you can target many different keywords in a single post.
Third-party keyword research tools aren’t essential to conducting reliable keyword research on Instagram, but they can help categorize and organize your keyword data itself.
If you’re planning a broad campaign, it may be worth considering using a keyword research tool in conjunction with Instagram’s internal search function to ensure your campaigns are tightly organized.
4. Use YouTube’s Autocomplete Search Functionality
YouTube isn’t just for finding funny cat videos – it’s actually the second most popular search engine (coming in #2 behind Google.) To find related key terms, type in the main term and see what YouTube delivers:
Granted, not all terms are useful – for example, [B2B gta glitch] is probably not what you’re looking for if you search B2B – but it’s still a great source for topic ideas and SEO keywords.
With so much video content being produced and uploaded to YouTube every day, keyword research and optimization are absolutely crucial to marketers hoping to grow their online audience.
Content discovery plays a major role in optimizing content for YouTube, and as such it’s important that your keyword research be as comprehensive as possible, especially if you’re trying to compete in a crowded or competitive vertical.
There are a number of third-party keyword suggestion tools built specifically for YouTube. Only you can decide which one best suits your needs, but if you’d rather work with YouTube’s internal functions, it’s actually a lot easier than it may look.
As a Google-owned property, YouTube has incorporated much of the technology of its parent company, including its search functionality. An excellent way to find new keyword suggestions to target with your video content or ads is by using “wildcard” searches.
To do this, enter part of a search term, and include an underscore character (“_”) in place of a missing word. YouTube will then offer up a series of suggestions, similarly to Google’s autocomplete search function, that can be a fantastic source of keyword ideas.
5. Dig Into Search Trends on Pinterest
Pinterest is home to more than burrito recipes and travel bucket lists – it can also be helpful for digging up long-tail keywords you might not have thought of on your own.
Like other search engines, Pinterest returns results based on what content it thinks users are most likely to interact with.
For example, searching [keyword research] returns a ton of content about how to analyze keywords, use free tools, and research specifically for organic traffic. Pinterest autocomplete provides even more ideas by suggesting search additions to a core keyword.
Optimizing content for discovery on Pinterest is tricky, due to the fact that the vast majority of content on Instagram is user-curated, meaning that Pinterest itself has limited input on what content appears on its site (beyond the typical terms and conditions concerning offensive content etc.).
There are, however, several ways to do it.
The first is similar to using Google autocomplete functionality in wildcard searches, which is using Pinterest’s own search feature as a starting point.
6. Listen to What Influencers Are Saying on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is home to more than 722 million users and is seeing record levels of engagement. If you are in B2B, sales, marketing, or target high-level decision-makers, LinkedIn should become your new home.
There are a few ways to use LinkedIn for keyword research, including following what influencers are talking about.
Search for a keyword, then select people to find influencers, then click See all activity on their profile. This will show you any posts they’ve shared in the last 90 days.
Look for hashtags, content ideas, and groups they interact with. Like YouTube and Instagram, you can also use LinkedIn’s autocomplete feature to find related terms.
7. Use BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a social media tool designed to help you find the most engaging topics, connect with influencers, and monitor popular topics. That might now sound like the best place for keyword research, but it is.
Here’s why – Buzzsumo looks at the most engaging content across multiple social platforms, which means it’s listening just about everywhere.
Here are the results for “b2b sales”:
Notice it shows the most engaging content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. Plus, you can use the filters to sort by location, content type, word count, and dominate reaction.
You will also like the “influencers” search tool, which lets you search for the topics the most influential people in the industry are talking about.
8. Explore Your Social Listening Tool
If you already use a social listening tool, like Awario and Mention, they are another solid source for keywords.
These tools do the legwork for you by gathering all the major topics people are talking about in one place. This will save you time, as you won’t have to dig into several tools.
You can also filter out the noise so you can focus on keywords that matter for your brand and industry. Use it to track your brand name, follow industry trends, and find influencers.
Social and Search Go Together Like Milk and Cookies
Social and search aren’t as separate as you might think. Sure, social media isn’t a direct ranking factor, but they are complementary. Social can help you better understand what topics your audience is interested in, what they post, and where they are most active.
By performing keyword research for social media and analyzing term usage on a site-by-site basis, you can gain an advantage over your competitors, who likely research keywords only once and with a blanket “one size fits all” approach across all marketing channels.
Remember that user behavior varies from search to social and from platform to platform and thus your approach to keyword research must also adapt.
By following the steps laid out in this expert guide to researching keywords for social media, you can leverage the domain authority of the Web’s most popular social networking sites to promote your brand, products, and services.
