If you are familiar with SEO and digital marketing, you will understand the importance of keyword research. Did you know that keyword research is not just used for PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns or optimizing websites for better results on the search engines? You can use keywords in your social media marketing campaign and it can be used to increase your online visibility.
You can use high quality keywords in the content of your social media campaign. These are the keywords that are relevant to your business and the campaign, have low competition and have high search volume. Here’s a couple of tips on why you should use specific keywords in your social media marketing campaign.
Increased visibility
Next to Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine in world. Twitter real-time search is also used and integrated on many 3rd party tools. Want to know something when it happens? Twitter search is where you will find it. Facebook search is not that great and I’m sure it will improve at some point. If you are optimizing your “social content” with high quality keywords, it can help improve your visibility on the social media channels which relies heavy on search to find what you are interested in. Include your keywords and phrased in your status update titles, content, tags, descriptions, video and image names when you are optimizing your SMM campaign.
By enhancing your SMM strategy with high quality keywords can help people reach you faster and build up your community. It can also help to grow the engagement levels on your campaign and drive quality traffic to your website and other online profiles. The next time you are analyzing your website analytics, have a look at your website’s referral traffic statistics. There’s a really good chance that you will see an increasing rate of referral traffic from the social media channels you are using in your campaign.
Improve search engine rankings
For a couple of months now, Google and Bing (powers Yahoo) have been displaying content from various social networks blended with traditional search results such as branded profiles, real-time updates and publicly posted content. Popularity and authority of the content definitely uses a few factors in determining what gets displayed in the search result pages. This is a huge step for them and the way that they categorize these results from social media channels is by looking at the keywords and keyword phrases you are using.
By improving your visibility on the social media channels you are using and the top search engines can result in greater brand awareness for you, leads, traffic, branding, revenue and ultimately – conversions. This shows you how important it is to have a well-managed social media presence with an optimized content strategy for converting visitors and achieving the ultimate business objectives with your social media campaign.
How to get started?
Start with doing some simple keyword research using any of your favourite keyword research tools. If you haven’t done keyword research before, have a look at the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool that you can use. Compile a short list of high priority keywords, print them out, and give everyone that is part of your campaign a copy of these keywords. Moving forward with your campaign, use these keywords when writing your Tweets, Facebook updates, Blog posts, YouTube video headlines, tags, descriptions and image names. Never make it look like robots are running your campaign. Your content should always be engaging and entice clicks from users.
Similar to search engine optimization, it is really not enough to just optimize content with keywords and think you are going be a great success. The content has to add some sort of value and you must include an optimized link building campaign if you want the best results.
If you are not using optimized keywords in your social media campaign, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity for improving your visibility online for your business with social media.