You Ask, I Answer: Optimizing for Social Search?

In today's episode, Andy asks, how do we think about optimizing our social content based on how search results appear in social search? So this is a search I presume in things like LinkedIn and Facebook and stuff. This is a very interesting question because those search engines don't work the way you think they should. Social media search engines all use the network graphs that are underlying search engines, underlying those social networks to return results that are based less on the query term and more on who you're connected to. So no matter what service you use, you use Facebook search, Instagram search, so on and so forth.

You will notice that the search results lean towards like what did you like who are you connected to, and what are the things that you or your friends have published? And then you'll get more general results out of that. They tend not to be um nearly as sophisticated as Google, for example. So they're still much more keyword-based versus semantic uh based like topics and things like that. So it is still more primitive uh search in the atispa aspect, but it is really driven by the network, by your network.

So if you want to optimize for search results, you're really talking about optimizing for people. Who are the people that are connected to your company or to connect it to your profiles? And how often do those people do searches for the topics you care about on the social networks you're operating on? So some of the things to think about, um, if you have uh groups, for example, like a LinkedIn group or Facebook group, which by the way, I don't encourage, uh, we'll talk about that in a second. But if you have groups that will show up in in search results um of people when someone's searching for, say, search engine optimization or data analytics or something, uh, whatever your company wants to be known for, if people are connected to you through those groups, directly connected to you, uh, there's a better than even chance that your entity will show up in their search results.

Now, uh very quickly on the topic of uh why I'm not a fan of having your company's groups on those places, because you're competing with the main news feed. So you're completing competing with the friends and family of somebody on those services, and you're competing with advertisers, uh, which is just uh an unpleasant uh challenge to try and tackle. I would strongly suggest looking at a service like Slack or Discord or Mattermost or something where there's a social network that is outside of these advertising-driven social networks, because they are always going to prioritize their paying customers, which is not us, right? The the marketers who are not paying money uh to them. That said, if you want to have everything's you know, sort of one-stop shopping, yeah, you can use it there.

But I know that from our own testing, when we were started our analytics for marketers group, we started it on Facebook, and we started with a hundred people, and inside of a week, even with decent content, um, and even with some engaged discussions, inside of a week, our posts are being seen by one percent of the group, and we're like, this is dumb. We are competing with the rest of Facebook. We move to Slack, and you know the performance has been substantially better than because Slack's revenue model is not based on ads. Um so always, if you're building a community, always build a community in a technology or a platform that uh does not make its money from ads. So, in terms of optimizing social content for social search, again, focus on the people.

Are you connected to the right people? And then are they engaging with your content in general? Right? So that if they happen to search for something uh on a social network, your content will show up because that connection is relevant. Uh, this is especially true on LinkedIn.

Uh, LinkedIn has a multi-objective optimization model. They actually did a whole podcast episode with their engineers on how LinkedIn itself functionally works. And one of the things that they do have running is uh tokenization of all the content and all the the words and phrases in your profile, in your first degree connections and your second degree connections. So if you are on LinkedIn and you are active in discussions and you're participating and leaving comments about, say, data analytics, LinkedIn begins to associate that term with your profile because you it's presumably in your profile, your company profile, it's presumably in your employees' uh profiles. Uh, it's presumably in the comments that you're leaving, and therefore, once it becomes aware that you have a specialization or a focus on that term, then when the search term comes up, um you get some discovery uh from that.

But it that is contingent upon you behaving in a very focused way on LinkedIn to take advantage of that algorithm. The other thing that does work for discovery purposes, particularly on uh Instagram, LinkedIn to a degree, and TikTok is hashtags. Hashtags are a discovery vehicle. When someone's looking for something, um, they will use hashtags just to see what's out there. Again, especially on a service like TikTok.

Uh, hashtags are one of the primary discovery mechanisms. And so if you're not including them in your social content, you're missing those opportunities to uh be discovered when somebody does look at those hashtags, especially uh on Instagram and TikTok. When you type in a hashtag into the search bar, you will see how many people view content about that particular hashtag. So if you have a hashtag that's like you know 78 letters long, you'll see it has like zero views. Um, but you choose something like hashtag marketing, hashtag social media.

Uh you will see that there are millions of views of that particular topic. So make sure that again you're using those for discovery purposes. But those would be my recommendations for optimizing for social search. One last thing I would suggest is ask your audience how often they search for uh your content or information about your products and services or the the thought leadership that you're publishing. Ask them how often they search for that on social networks.

Search and social are different behaviors. People behave differently in each place. When they are searching on a search engine, they have an intent to discover, to learn. When they're on social media, that is not as strong as an intent. They are usually looking to have conversations to connect with people, right?

And so you can optimize for social search, but generally speaking, it's probably not going to reap as large a reward, as large a return as it will on an actual search engine. So just bear that in mind as well. Good question. Thanks for asking.