Know Your Keywords And Hashtags! S11 EP01 🚀

When it comes to keyword hashtag and I will come to Kim for a keyword hashtag question, but then others can jump in as well. Now, do you have a specific tactic? Because keywords we all assume is just Instagram or we just assume it's Twitter. But actually now all of the channels are bringing keywords in to their general sphere, so it is very important. So Kim will start with you. How do you go about doing keyword research? What do you do and how long do you spend doing it?

Okay, so if I'm doing an Instagram post for a client, for example, and I'm looking for hashtags specifically, I will probably spend it up, sounds crazy, 10 to 15 minutes maybe looking at those hashtags for that particular post because it needs to relate to the image and to the text. You can't just copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. If I'm doing some blog writing and then I will go to Google and I will start typing into the search, like what to do in Devon with and then I'll see what comes up just to see what people are searching for, like teenagers. That's a good one. And the other thing you can do is there's a load of tools that you can use for this. But I'm quite fond of tubebuddy for looking at keyword research tools. That's really, really, really good, especially if you are doing YouTube videos, because you can just look at the keyword research tool and see what's popular, what's not, what's trending, and how likely you are to then trend in your video. So yeah, it takes time. You can't rush keyword research. But I think the main thing is to look what everyone else is searching for and to think what your customer is searching for.

So if there are people that are watching this or listening to this and thinking, oh, that sounds like a bit of a chore. The cool thing about this episode is that you've got four experts that are looking right at the screen right now. But you could reach out to on a one on one basis and maybe hire to do some keyword research for and with you. So please do go and follow everybody. The link, the shout out there because the screen, the sound went a little bit muffled. Was Tubebuddy T U B E B U D D Y Do you adopt a similar style when it comes to keyword research or have you got another gem that you could potentially throw in there, please?

Yes. Although I probably wouldn't spend 15 minutes on every post. So now I Feel like I need to. So I'll take my hat off to you, Kim.

Sorry about that.

No, it's okay. What I do for my clients on a regular basis though is I do spend quite a bit of time looking at their competitors and seeing what keywords and hashtags they are using. Obviously they're not always the right ones, but you can kind of obviously gauge to see what kind of results they are getting. So one of the first things I do when I pick up a new client is do that kind of thing. There's also, as well as the great tools that Kim mentioned, I also use for questions, something called Answer the public. I don't know if you've seen that, but that's a really great tool as well. It will give you lots of different questions that are similar to something that you pop into the search engine. And it's probably a little bit more useful for blogs like Kim has mentioned. But it does also help to see the sort of questions across the Internet that are asked about a specific subject. So, you know, then you can maybe talk about those things on your social media.

Yeah, I love that you have mentioned that website. I was literally doing a bit of content around content creation and that was one of the places that mentioned. So thank you so much for mentioning that. Okay, let's go to Craig. Let's go to Craig. Sue, I'm afraid you're gonna be last on this one.

So like Kim, I also YouTube, buddy. Even the free version. Very good to give you some keywords in there. I also use YouTube and what I try to do, I put in my phrase and then I look at what's a similar word that means the same thing. So you use an alternative word that has a similar meaning. So, you know, different people might be putting something similar in. And then obviously you're looking at the search results. You're looking at what's coming up in the drop down in the search bar or completing the search and look what comes up at the very bottom. And there are different searches down there because it says people also search for. And that gives you some good research there. And then also we'll just look at what other local businesses are using in the area. So I've got CL in areas where I don't live. So I don't know about the region or about the geography. So I look at what the other businesses are using and what the other businesses are using in that area and see if they're relevant to the business I'm working for.

Amazing. Thank you, buddy. And I Like how a few of us now have mentioned about looking at what other people are doing, and particularly when I say look at what other people are doing, success leaves clues. So go and find the people that you can see that are doing so well on maybe Instagram or Facebook. See what posts are relating because you don't have to reinvent the wheel a lot. A lot of the time, what is really important, you don't copy word for word, but you take inspiration from it. And again, success leaves clues. And that is literally what I did at the Granary when we were growing our social media. There's a really cool feature on your Facebook page, Insights, where you can go and follow other pages and you can see which of their posts get the most traction. What would you. Let's open up a little bit more. What would you do in sort of research on a whole? Say you've got a new client that comes to you and goes, sir, we really need a lot of help here. How do you. What do you use? I can see you've got Yoast in the background as one of. One of the lovely little things. Yes.

Yeah.

A lot of the other tools that the other guys have mentioned, but certainly when I put together a social media strategy for a client, the first thing I do is do what I call my competitor analysis. And that is literally, like we've all said, going out and seeing exactly what the client believes are their competitors and how they're managing on social media. As you've said, I think knowledge is power. How can we possibly really counter an argument or counter a campaign against another business if we have no idea how they are actually performing? And it's pulling those strengths, those weaknesses, those opportunities and the threats all together, from what you can see, that your competitors or are putting out there. So that's usually a big chunk of work that like to get started with on the sort of keyword and sort of hash tag research. Again, I'd like to say I'd spend 15 minutes every post, but I try and do a lot of that at the beginning as part of the strategy to create what I call hashtag collections. So it's like a series of maybe 10 to 20 hashtags around certain themes or campaign areas that I want to look at. And then I will search those hashtags and bring those into the collections so that I've got a nice selection of a couple of big ones, a couple of middle ones, but then more specific ones like, like Kim mentioned, that are really going to sort of drill down the detail of where what you want to be found for prior to, I think blame it on the American election. The related hashtags element within Instagram was a great tool and you could do a lot of that organically. That tool at the moment has been taken. I understand it's coming back, but I think we'll have to wait a little while. So I've actually gone over to use another tool called Flick, which basically allows me to develop these collections by putting in keywords and then developing 10 to 20, 30 collections of different hashtags around certain themes. And again, those are measured in the hierarchy. So I'm looking at larger ones, smaller ones and sort of medium sized ones. So I find that bringing all of that together, bringing all that into the strategy. I've then got again, a good tool that Craig mentioned. Once I've got all of those hashtags in place, putting all of those into my phone, into notes, I've always got them there or I've been able to just pull them from Flick and copy them across into hootsuite, which is what I would tend to do. And mixing them up. Don't get stale with your hashtags, don't use the same 30 in the same order. Post after post after post, really try and mix them up and try and bring in, you know, obviously for where I'm based, I always use Stokesly because that's where I want to be found. So I always make sure that somewhere in that 30, it's for my business that that one is mentioned and added in there. Just mentioning quickly about. You said about using Facebook. Obviously the Facebook business pages are changing. They've actually given back to us, which is lovely that the dedicated news feed, because it disappeared for a while, it's now come back and it's now been put in a more prominent place. And again, that's a great way of working and seeing what else is going on out there. And also a top tip is to look at the page transparency tab on Facebook business pages because again, you can go down into that and find out what similar types of businesses are doing on the advertising side, which again will give you information to plan your own campaign.

That is a really good tip and I'm really glad you mentioned it because again, so many people don't realise that it's there. Now, this is being in episode one of season 11 of the Boostly podcast and if you've enjoyed it, I would love for you to let me know. I crave your feedback on this. If this is something that you want me to do. More of, then please let me know. Post it in the comments below.