Maximising your brand’s visibility: a guide to Social SEO

The popularity of short-form content is in our day and age rapidly rising and during the new year this won’t change. In fact, 90% of global marketers will increase or maintain their investment in short-form videos this year. So, what is so important about short-form video content that makes marketers invest big time in it? Simply said: what does short-form content do for your brand?

Well, let’s have a look at your consumer. 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short-form video to discover new products (wyzowl, 2022). Does this mean that the younger generation only watches short videos? No! According to YouTube’s Culture and Trends Insights team, 59% of Gen Z watch longer versions of videos they discover on short video apps.

This makes short-form content a great addition to your already existing long-form video strategy. Think of: grabbing your consumers’ attention with user generated product demo and then guiding them to your long-form video to learn more or showcasing the highlights of your longer episodes in Shorts to gain new traffic and subscribers.

More and more social media users are treating (short-form) video platforms as a search engine. And this didn’t go unnoticed. TikTok and YouTube (read: Google) are enhancing their Social Search features, to serve their users videos that are closer to their intent. TikTok is becoming more and more visible within search results (Ahrefs, 2022).

And let’s not forget about Shorts – these also appear now in the search results of Google (and YouTube). This trend should prompt you to think about your brand’s social SEO strategy to ensure visibility across all aspects of these platforms – within all the phases of the marketing funnel.

The first step to any video strategy is research. Research into your niche, the current trends, your target group behaviour and the most searched questions regarding your topic. Based on this research, you’ll get clear which key words you’re going to create your video around.

Ok, so search behaviour is changing. More and more people use TikTok, Shorts and Reels to find new hotspots, tips and DIYs. This offers you the opportunity to influence mass orienting consumers through optimised video content. But a question that you might be having is: which video content should I make to succeed? How do I know which type of TikToks, Reels or Shorts my audience is searching for? The answer is: data!

Using the predictive power of multiple search engines (and not only Google) we can get answers to which content you as a brand should make to optimally serve your audience with short-form video. Basically it is a search-driven tool that tells you exactly which content to produce to score in any search engine – spotting new opportunities before your competitors do. Want to learn more about using data and research to succeed with your Social SEO strategy?