Picking Keywords for Your Social Media Efforts

CopyPress

October 14, 2013 (Updated: February 9, 2023)

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Keyword research and analysis has been a longtime practice of SEO experts, many of whom focus on implementing keywords on websites and guest posts. This has proven effective for increasing a web site’s visibility in search engines, but website keywords aren’t the only factor in attracting visitors to your website or brand.

Recently, the popularity of social media has created an entirely new realm in SEO, one where social media plays a prominent role. Some SEO specialists make the error of only focusing their keyword efforts on traditional outlets, like website copy, and don’t put much thought into their wording on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. With social media offering a wide range of flexibility and analytics for brands and websites, considering keyword placement on these networks is now vital for SEO purposes.

Keyword research on social media has a variety of benefits that include networking, market interest analysis and customizable analytics that can help determine a keyword’s popularity and value. While many practices of keyword analysis apply universally, there are different methods for finding effective keywords, dependent on the type of social network you’re using.

Twitter

Twitter is a very effective social media platform for utilizing keywords, especially since hashtags have broken out of Twitter and can be found on TV shows, ice cream containers, and billboards. Sites like Hashtags.org provide a peek at what’s buzzing on Twitter, listing trending and popular hashtags in a news-like layout.

If your tweet uses a keyword-relevant hashtag and is able to generate significant retweets and favorites, the keyword results will be successful. By using Twitter search sites like Hashtags.org and TweetScan, you can analyze the popularity and success of specific keywords on Twitter.

Facebook

Analyzing keywords is not as easy with Facebook. Although Facebook has recently introduced hashtags to the News Feed, there is no viable way to access universal keyword data. Facebook used to offer a service called Facebook Lexicon that tracked buzzwords, but for now marketing analytics are limited to owners of pages.

Since you likely already have a Facebook page for your website or brand, utilize certain keywords in status updates and track the reach, number of engaged users, and virality by clicking ‘See All’ next to the insights on the Facebook page. Utilizing this and Facebook’s primary search bar should yield enough to help you pick a keyword for your social media efforts on Facebook.

YouTube

Conveniently, YouTube has made available their own Keyword Tool to aid your analysis. With it, you can discover the most popular video searches on YouTube, which should provide a decent idea of how a specific keyword should do.

By looking at the most successful videos in a category relevant to your niche, you can see what types of titles and formatting results in an active user response. By choosing relevant keywords and formatting these keywords correctly into your video’s title and description, you are bound to see a significantly higher number of plays.

By analyzing the effectiveness of specific keywords and keyword formatting ideas on these three social media giants, your social media efforts will increase your brand’s level of visibility and encourage more customer interaction.

Courtney Gordner is a blogger with a passion for all things internet, social media and SEO! Read more from her on her own blog, www.talkviral.com

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