Can SOCIAL SEARCH Replace Google Search?

Maybe you've noticed, but consumer behavior has really evolved and changed over the last few years, and as a result, the platforms have to adapt to keep up with that behavior. Google isn't the only player in the search game anymore. I'm Sam, by the way. You might have seen me on TikTok at marketing with Sam Bumble needs help. Consumers will love these updates and marketers will hate them. These books changed my career and by day I'm a marketer and I'm also an adjunct professor teaching Social media marketing. For a long time, business owners and marketers have always created content to to rank their websites higher in search results. Real talk how many times have you gone to a recipe website to get the recipe and then had to scroll through like paragraphs and paragraphs just to get to the recipe itself? I know I can't be the only one. Let's play a quick game of Would you rather Would you rather go see a brand commercial about a new sneaker drop to get an idea of whether or not you want to buy those sneakers or go on social media search for those exact sneakers and see a review from a real person? I know I choose the latter all day and this is also what people are doing too. This is one reason why people are changing the way that they search. In fact, according to the State of Social Media report linked in the description below, 87% of social media marketers have noted that they see consumers looking for brands more on social channels than they do actually in search engines in 2024 alone. Let's talk a little bit more about using social search for your brand's content. I always like to start with a little bit of research to figure out what people are posting within my focus area or my category. This way, as I'm conducting my research, I can quickly see what's working and what's not, and I always ask myself the same three questions. 1. Is the content that I'm seeing engaging? And you can look at the engagement metrics on specific videos or pieces of content to see this. 2. Is this content actually helpful? And 3 Is there a way that I could make this content better? As you're looking through videos in your specific category, you may also start to see some trends in terms of the different types of video styles. For example, we know that how to use and lists always seem to work pretty well when it comes to engagement. But if I specifically go to search for Best Croissant Nashville, I find that a lot of the videos and content that shows up in that specific search result kind of all follow the same style and flow. Based on doing research and conducting our takeaways, now is a good time to start brainstorming out the type of content that we want to create. Now, just like there are best practices for regular SEO, there are also best practices for social search that I recommend if you really want to optimize your content. For example, clearly I'm biased here, but I'm making video. And video tends to work especially well for social search. Now why is that? Well, when you create videos for social, you're given the option to include subtitles that automatically transcribe what you're saying, like this right here. And subtitles help signal to the algorithm exactly what your content is about. Think of it just like content. Content and text that lives on a website or a blog post, it's the same exact thing. Using video is a definite win. But if you're still not comfortable with video, you can always use photo carousels, which are like the little photo swipe throughs. And as long as you're using text overlays in your photo carousels, you'll still be able to index that content and make that signal to the algorithm just like you would in video content. Regardless of which style video you choose, you'll always have the opportunity to create something called a post caption. And a post caption is just another way to add keyword rich text. So for example, if I am writing a post about how to market my small business, I would include in the post caption how to market my small business five tips that I've seen work really well. To be completely honest, there's no definitive research that says that a longer caption automatically helps your post perform better. So don't feel like you need to write a novel here. You also want to encourage people to watch your video. So try out different types of captions. Try out longer captions, shorter captions. Also, you don't need to give away all of your content in the post caption. Let the viewer go through watch the video swipe through the carousel. That's really the fun part. After you've written out your post caption, there is one more thing that is like the icing on the cake and that is hashtags. Hashtags help further index your content, but you don't need to go and start making up hashtags within your post. There's actually an easier way to do this. Remember how you conducted research in the search bar before? We're actually going to go back to that and use the same post Caption that we've used, for example, how to mark market my small business in the search toolbar. From there, what I can actually do, especially on TikTok and Instagram, is I can scroll over to the hashtag section, and this hashtag section is going to give me a ton of relevant hashtags that I can then use in my post. Not only can I get hashtag ideas by doing this, but I can also see how frequently certain hashtags have been used. And from there, I can mix and match and experiment with different types of hashtags to see what yields me the best possible reach. With that said, I've typically found that five to eight hashtags is like this sweet spot for a post. Sweet. Now you have your post caption, your hashtags, and your subtitles all ready to go. By the way, some of these tips might sound familiar, and that's because we're really taking the foundation of what traditional SEO is, and we're applying it to the social search model. Search is all about getting our content indexed for discovery. But instead of that discovery happening on Google, we're now using it to program social platforms. Okay, so now we've gone through how to optimize your posts for social search. But there is one thing that is missing, and I think so many business owners sleep on this, and that is the fact that you can actually also optimize your profile. It makes such a big difference, I swear. Just like you can search for videos or hashtags and places on social, you can actually search for users. And that's where optimizing your social profile comes in handy. More specifically, the name that you have on your social profile. For example, let's say I go onto Instagram and I search for my city, plus the term hair stylist, and I'll start to see a bunch of different hairstylists that live in my city. But how did they get there? Instead of using their name for their social profile, they're actually going in and using keywords to program the name in their profile. So they're using things like the services that they provide, hairstylists. And they're also using the city that they live in, let's say Nashville. And so that's how they're able to show up in the search terms. And you can do this for your brand and pretty much any social media platform. But let's say you're a popular brand, like crumble cookies. If you're more well recognized as a brand, you might just want to stick to using your brand name versus using a variation of like your name and the services that you offer, because people are going to be more inclined to search for that. Anyway, keep in mind, all of the tips that we're talking about are helping you get discovered in social search. So let's fast forward. You've optimized your profile, you've started creating content, you're in a little groove and you're feeling tired. Like really tired, because this is a lot of work. This is exactly why I recommend brands take advantage of what I like to call content cycling. Content cycling is repurposing your content across different platforms so that you're not coming up with unique content for every single platform. For example, this video that I'm making right now lives on YouTube, but I can slice and dice six different pieces of this content and put it on TikTok and Instagram and I other platforms to really maximize my reach. This is the true power of content cycling. But once you're in the habit of content cycling, you're also going to want to make sure that you're checking your reporting and your analytics. And I know while it might not sound super fun, it is super necessary. So there's a few different ways that I like to do this. One is taking a look at your website analytics to see which sources are driving your traffic, especially given this video. We want to take a look at which sources are coming from social, which traffic is coming from social platforms. We also want to evaluate our engagement rates. So what I like to do is add up all the different types of engagement, likes, comments, shares, saves, and then divide that by the number of impressions that my post got and multiply by 100 to get the engagement rate for that specific post. If you do this for a few of your different posts, you'll start to see trends like which which posts do you notice are getting higher engagement rates and are there certain themes within that content that you can continually replicate? The last thing I always like to do is look at positive and negative sentiment. Like are people commenting with a lot of positivity or do they have negative feedback for me? And what does that say about the style post that I'm doing and how can I rethink that for the future? Okay, and one more thing. It's the time in the video when I need to give you just a little bit of tough love. Just because you create content, optimize it, optimize your profile, look at your analytics, do content cycling. All of the things we just talked about doesn't mean that overnight you're going to become a social search success and have incredible results. At least not right away. And I'm sorry, listen, we're all at the mercy of each platform's unique algorithm. But even if your content wasn't high, performing according to the algorithm gods doesn't mean that it wasn't actually helpful to someone somewhere out there. Who knows, maybe the few people that engaged with your content are actually the people who are going to end up being your future customers down the line. Don't get embarrassed, don't delete, but learn and iterate and create content in the future from those learnings. There are also a lot of other factors that go into creating quality content that also help with social SEO. Like the type of photos and videos that you use, your hooks that you're using at the beginning of your video, or your content that we didn't even go into in this video. But experimentation and discipline are key here. Don't be afraid to experiment with different types of topics too. Like, you never know when a new topic is actually gonna get you a ton of reach and engagement. You might also wanna try different formats or trends and really see what sticks. Oh, and one other thing. Do not okay Pinky, promise me, do not post and ghost, okay? Posting once or twice on the platforms isn't going to do you any favors. To be successful in social, you really have to be consistent and that means not showing once a month, but actually showing up at least once weekly and putting out content. Make it a priority and you will reap the rewards. I promise. Social and search, when combined, are very unexpected together, but when done right, this combo creates the most beautiful marketing strategy that is perfect for the modern brand. Social SEO truly is the way to get discovered by your current and future customers. Also side note, the best part by the way, is that social SEO is relatively new, so if you start putting it into practice now, you really are going to reap the rewards early. You'll also see a big advantage over your competitors, so don't wait. Start implementing social SEO today and see where it takes your brand. Who knows where you could be by the end of this year? Do you have questions? Are you already testing social SEO? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you in the next video. Sam.