Optimize Your Social Media to Show Up in Search
As digital marketers, our primary goal is to get our business discovered on the internet. Keywords are the stepping stones that will guide users on their path to discover you.
We most often associate keywords, or the words or phrases you type into a search bar, with SEO — search engine optimization.
Part of your SEO strategy hopefully already involves using keywords strategically throughout your website to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. You can’t pay for your page to rank higher in organic search results. You need to use keywords so your site will show up in search engine results.
In addition to your website, you should also be using keywords strategically in your social media profiles. Why? Because the platforms are search engines.
Keywords can get your profile found on Google
Using keywords strategically in your social media profile can result in your profile coming up on Google. Look at this example — When I Googled “Durham brand photographer,” on the very first page of search results Nikia Williams Photography’s Instagram account comes up. This is because she is strategically using her Instagram profile to share that she is a “Durham branding photographer”
How to show up in search
Instagram told us to show up in the search results, you’ll want to be strategic about choosing your handle and profile name.
If we look again at Nikia’s profile, she used carefully selected keywords in the ‘name’ section of her Instagram profile instead of using that space to write out her name. And it worked. As you can see having her selected keywords there are what helped her show up when I Googled those same keywords looking for a brand photographer in Durham.
Instagram also told us to show up in search, we should include relevant keywords and location in our bio. Again, having these keywords strategically in your profile will help the algorithm flag your profile when someone searches for that phrase.
What you should do
To optimize your social media profiles follow these steps:
Use a search tool such as keywordtool, Google Keyword Planner or Google Search Console to research what keywords people are searching related to your business.
Brainstorm a list of potential keywords
Select one phrase
Place that phrase into the ‘name’ section of Instagram
Now sit back and watch the algorithm work it’s magic!