Here’s what you need to know about creating a keyword strategy for your social media campaign

If you are at all 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 optimising websites for better organic results on the search engines? You should also use keywords in your social media campaigns to increase your online visibility.

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign. Research and select keywords that are relevant to your business that you can use in your social media strategy. Find some tips below on why you should do keyword research with your social media campaign.

Increased visibility

Next to Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Twitter real-time search is also used and integrated on many third 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 optimising 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 in your status update titles, content, tags, descriptions, video and image names when you are busy with your social media campaign.

By enhancing your social media 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 analysing your website analytics, have a look at your website’s social media traffic statistics.

There’s a really good chance that you will see an increasing rate of social media traffic from the channels you are using.

Improve search engine rankings

For quite a while now, Google 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.

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 by doing some simple keyword research using any of the available 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 a robot is running your campaign. Your content should always be engaging and entice clicks from users.

Similar to search engine optimisation, it is really not enough to just optimise content with keywords and think you are going be a great success. The content should be magnetic and pull people in.

If you are not using optimised 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.