Social Media Keyword Research

Have you ever thought about using social media for your keyword research? Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and all other social networks can offer very interesting ideas for finding new keywords for your SEO strategy.

Users spend an average of about 3 hours of their time every day on social media doing research, telling platforms what they like, where they go, and who they are with. All of these actions contribute to user targeting and can help your keyword research. Want to know how?

In this post, we look at 5 keyword research strategies for your social media business.

Table of Contents

1. Search for new keywords via Facebook

If you think you know your audience well, know that there are those who know them even better: Facebook! The social network par excellence has a huge amount of data from its users, such as what events and places they attend, what their passions are, who they spend their time with, and much more.

How to turn this valuable information into interesting data for your keyword research? One idea could be to take advantage of sector Facebook groups.

For example, if you deal with home furnishings, join various Facebook groups that talk about this topic and delve into the main themes of users.

Facebook very often facilitates tasks by enclosing them in the “Topics” tab. Here is an example of different trending topics:

2. New keyword ideas via Instagram hashtags

What was once a simple photo editing app is now a full-fledged search engine. We are talking about Instagram. How to use it to find new keywords? Through hashtags!

Go to Instagram and enter a keyword of your interest, the platform will give you other similar options used by users. We tried to play this game and here are – for example – a couple of results for two different sectors: catering and footwear research.

To go even deeper, select one of the hashtags suggested by Instagram and open the most popular images. Check if there are other hashtags in the copy of those posts and you will get more ideas for your keywords.

Here’s an example of one of the most popular images for #womenfashion:

3. Use Twitter Search to find new keywords

Twitter trends move in near real-time, making the social network a great place to research new keywords.

To find interesting topics for SEO optimization of your content, go to the “explore” section of Twitter and check out the “for you” and “trend” topics. You will be able to discover new trends and keywords relevant to your industry.

However, this is a useful and successful strategy only if you are an active user on Twitter: the more you are present on the platform, the more the trends will be relevant to your preferences (in the case of a company profile, to the reference market) and you will be able to find a mine of useful information also for researching niche and longtail keywords that you otherwise would not have been able to imagine.

4. Use YouTube autocomplete to find keywords

Let’s not forget that Youtube is a real search engine, as well as being a very popular and used social network all over the world. One of the advantages of Youtube for searching for new keywords is the automatic completion once you enter the beginning of a word (a bit like Google does too!).

Here’s how it works. Let’s take the word “trick” for example and see how many interesting suggestions appear!

5. Find new keywords trending on TikTok

How not to mention TikTok, the social network of the moment, to look for new interesting keywords for your business? Especially if your ideal customers are very young or belong to GenZ, the information you can find on TikTok will really be gold for your keyword research.

Here’s how: open TikTok and go to the explore section. As with Instagram, enter the beginning of a word here to see related hashtags and topics. You will likely find different results than those on Instagram (or Youtube), which can further enrich your keyword research.

We did a test with two distinctly different topics: “sushi” and “chandeliers”.

Final thought

We have seen 5 different strategies for doing different keyword searches using social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok are platforms with multiple functions, but it is almost never thought that they can also be useful for researching new keywords.

Think about it yourself before the competition and you will gain a clear competitive advantage!