Photo by: Cottonbro Studio

Scenario: You’ve finally got your brand’s social media channels up and running, complete with beautifully crafted content showcasing your all-natural, dye-free laundry detergent – great! But you’ve run into a slight problem: Who exactly is your target audience, and how do you find them across your social media channels? The answer: Keywords.  

By the end of this blog, you will understand how using keywords can help find your target audience on social media, how to utilize best practices for keyword research, and the value keywords bring to your brand.

 

The Importance of Keywords in Social Media Marketing

What Are Keywords?

So, what exactly are these keywords in the context of social media marketing? Keywords are specific words or phrases used by a brand’s potential purchaser. For instance, revisiting our earlier scenario, your brand’s potential customers might search for phrases like “What Are the Best Natural Laundry Detergents?” or “Top 10 Natural Laundry Detergents” on their preferred search engine. If your all-natural laundry detergent company is using these keywords effectively, your product is more likely to appear in search results when potential buyers look them up.

Why Keywords Matter in Social Media Marketing

Now that we understand what keywords are, we need to ask ourselves this burning question: Why do they matter so much to us marketers in social media marketing? As Taiwo Damilola of TechieBreed mentions, your target audience will regularly use hashtags, specific words, or phrases to discover appealing content and to find conversations to join on their preferred social media platforms. When social media marketers understand how their target audience uses keywords on a specific platform, they can create content and copy that aligns with those frequently used phrases, ensuring their brand reaches their target audience through keywords, and also by participating in key conversations that are relevant to their target audience.

 

Selecting the Right Keywords

Think Like Your Customer

When trying to find your target audience on the social media platforms you’re present on, you need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask yourself, ‘What keywords and queries might they look up to find my brand’s products and services?’ Don’t overthink this and make it more difficult than it has to be! In fact, great steps to follow in this process include: 

• Pinpointing your target audience.
• Understanding the challenges they face, what they need, and how your product or service can provide a solution.
• Using helpful analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, social media analytics, or Google Trends, to gain in-depth insights into your potential target market’s online behavior. 

Types of Keywords

When choosing the keywords you use, do you want them to be broad or as specific as possible? According to Amy Jauman in her Social Media Research & Analysis book, it is recommended to be somewhere in the middle with your keyword selection. Why? Although your keywords should be specific and relevant phrases to your target audience, if they are too specific, you’ll end up having a more difficult time reaching those individuals. On the other hand, if your keywords are too broad, also known as single-word keywords, it can also be tough to stand out due to the extreme competitiveness of those types of keywords. Examples of too-specific and too-broad of keywords are as follows: 

• Too specific: All-natural 52 FL OZ liquid laundry detergent made in the U.S.A.
• Too broad: Laundry detergent 

To find your keyword sweet spot, we recommend using long-tail keywords, which consist of around four to eight words. The benefit here is that there will be less competition for your brand when using these types of keywords. An example of a long-tail keyword we can use for our hypothetical all-natural and dye-free liquid laundry detergent brand could be “liquid laundry detergent with natural ingredients.” 

 

Identifying Your Core Audience with Keywords

Conducting Keyword Searches

Now that we have a better understanding of which types of keywords to avoid and which to use, how do we tie this into using them on social media platforms to find our target audience? We can simply do this through keyword research. By implementing this method, social media marketers can discover which keywords on specific social media platforms are of most value to their target audience’s demands and preferences. Also, social media marketers can craft more targeted social media content for their audience, while also attracting more users to their profiles and websites.

Types of Audience Members You May Find

As you research keywords on social media platforms, you’ll likely find that the various segments of your audience are made up of the following: 

• Potential customers 
• Loyal customers
• Influencers
• Industry experts
• Competitors 
• Rival brand supporters and unsatisfied customers

 

Keyword Research Best Practices

Creating Keyword Groups

When choosing keywords to use to help promote your brand’s products or services on social media, it is important to use keyword groupings. This means that your brand creates multiple groups of similar keywords. These groups can be used to help develop content that is optimized for several keyword phrases by incorporating each unique keyword from each group. So, for example, keyword groupings for our natural laundry detergent can be seen as follows:

Keyword Group 1: Natural Liquid Laundry Detergent

• Keyword 1: Best natural laundry detergent

• Keyword 2: Natural laundry detergent reviews

• Keyword 3: …

Keyword Group 2: Most Cost-effective Natural Laundry Detergent

• Keyword 1: Best natural laundry detergent on a budget

• Keyword 2: Cheapest natural laundry detergent 

• Keyword 3: …

Additionally, as a rough guideline, Google recommends that brands put around five to twenty words in each keyword group.

And remember, you do NOT have to manually compile your keywords for each group! Take advantage of keyword research tools such as SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Serpstat to help make the process as efficient as possible. 

 

Why Keywords Are Valuable for Your Brand

How Keywords Drive Results

After conducting your extensive keyword research, selecting the right keywords for your target audience and grouping those keywords, using them in your social media content will not only help you gain eyes on your brand, but it can also assist in obtaining more organic traffic to your other digital channels, such as your website or other social media platforms. 

Measuring Success

Tying everything we’ve learned together: How can you find out how the keywords you’ve selected are performing on social media? Eddy Gutierrez from Flying V Group suggests using social media monitoring tools like BuzzSumo to track how well your keywords are performing on each of the platforms your brand is present on. These tools give insights into how frequently your keywords are mentioned by your audience. 

 

Key Takeaways

Now that you have a solid understanding on how to use keywords to find your target audience on social media platforms through keyword selection, using those keywords to identify your core audience, utilizing best practices for keyword research, and understanding the value of keywords for your brand, we hope that you’re able to crush your competition on your social media platforms and improve your social media presence! 

Have any further questions or insights on using keywords to find your target audience on social media? We’d love for you to leave us a comment down below!

 

Author: Sam Cuellar

Digital Marketing graduate from DePaul University, Marketing & Sales Coordinator at the National Institute for Social Media, and professional bass player with a passion for music, weightlifting, traveling, and social media marketing.