Grow Your Business with the Right Keywords and Hashtags

Using Keywords and Hashtags to Grow Your Audience and get More Customers.

Let’s say you have unique insider knowledge. You craft compelling content around it. You release it on social media, and …your words get swallowed in the World Wide Web’s black hole, with not so much as a soul knowing your content exists. With over 3.6 billion people on social media in 2020, you should be able to find an audience, right?

So, what’s going wrong? One likely answer is keywords.

The internet, to put it simply, is just a very big and powerful a word organizer. From Facebook to Google and Twitter, these companies depend on showing users exactly what they want to see, and keeping users entertained. And they do this with keywords. 

Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but keywords are at the heart of the algorithms that drive the internet and social media. Keywords are what connects users with content. Understanding the importance of keywords and how they are used will allow you to better harness the power of social media, to reach a wider audience and customer base for your business. 

And if you are creative about it, you won’t need to spend a dime on it. While social media platforms tend towards reducing organic reach to force people into spending ad money, there is still untapped potential in the space.

Getting found on social media nowadays requires preparation. Gone are the days where you could post anything and get visibility. As a platform’s number of users grows, so does the amount of user-generated content on them. 

In this article, you are going to learn how to understand and use keywords to your benefit. We will discuss how to find the perfect audience down to the exact niche, how to research keywords, and how hashtags help boost your reach.

Finding Your Audience

This is the most important step, yet so many businesses gloss over it. You need to have a clear idea of who you’re trying to reach. After all, if you try to reach everyone, you’ll end up reaching no one.

Social media users have become extremely sophisticated. They don’t engage with generic content anymore. They want to see interesting content tailored to their needs. 

Researching your audience to provide them with the content they want to see is the fastest way to reaching a wider audience on social media. One of the best ways to research your audience is by using a web and social analytics tool like Mandala Analytics. 

It works like this:

Mandala gathers mentions from the major social media platforms based on keywords that you input. Your Mandala dashboard shows you a range of data analytics from all the mentions that have been gathered. This includes the level of engagement (likes, shares, comments, or views) that a social post receives, it will show the individual posts where your keyword is mentioned, the sentiment, and lots more. By analyzing mentions individually, you can build a customer/audience persona that includes age, gender, location, interests etc. 

Another interesting tool on your mandala dashboard is the word cloud and hashtag cloud. This will show you keywords and hashtags that are frequently found in the same mentions as your keywords, it’s a fantastic way to get ideas for keywords and hashtags that you may not have thought of. 

Understanding where Your Audience Hangs Out

Once you know who your ideal customers are, it’s time to research where they hang out, and how they use the various social media platforms. Each platform is different in its own way, and users have different expectations for each of them. 

Using Mandala Analytics, you can analyze which platforms have the highest number of mentions and engagement, based on keywords related to your field. For example, if you have a business selling camping equipment, set up a campaign with keywords like ‘camping’, ‘tent’, ‘adventure’ etc., and you’ll see the distribution of mentions (posts containing those keywords) across the different social platforms. You can sort posts by how much engagement they receive to see where audiences are responding to content, you can search the mentions by additional keywords to get even more specific, and there are tons of other metrics and functions as well.  

Researching the Keywords and Hashtags Your Audience Uses

Keyword research on social media is a science in itself. Each platform offers an ad platform with powerful targeting options. But what we found works best is simply using each platform’s search bar. 

Start typing your generic keyword (for example: ‘fitness’), and see what the autocomplete suggests. Repeat this process for each suggested keyword, and see what content comes up. Study this content in great detail: who is it targeted at? What hashtags does it use? Do people engage with it, and if so, how?

For more in-depth keyword research, Mandala gives insights including gender, time of posting, and even sentiment analysis. Using Mandala for your keyword and hashtag research means that everything can be saved and analyzed later, you can tag mentions to put them into different categories or projects to be shared with your team.

Now that you know where to find your customers, it’s time to spend some time with them. This is called social listening. It’s a part of analytics that involves gaining insight on what people are talking about in your industry. It’s also useful to learn what people are saying about your brand.   

Social listening comes with 2 key benefits:

●    You can discover pain points you didn’t think about, honing your customer personas

●    You find out the most common hashtags in the niche

Mandala is a powerful all-in-one solution for social media analytics, social listening and a lot more. Give it a try now, free for seven days.

Now you have all the data you need to maximize your content’s distribution. 

Creating the Content

Content creation can be daunting at times, but when you know your ideal customers in great detail, it becomes very easy. You know what these people are looking for, what they need, and how they search for their problems’ solutions.

The perfect social media post is one that’s full of value and easy to share. Short videos and infographics have the best chance to go viral. Each share you get improves your social proof score, which signals the platform’s algorithm that your content resonates with people. This increases the chances your future content will get shown to more people, improving your reach.

Mandala is an excellent tool for analyzing the effectiveness of content, because it can sort posts by their level of engagement. If the purpose of your content is to engage the audience, then study the highest-engagement posts in your industry and learn what makes for effective content. 

Conclusions

The social media content marketing game is one of cat and mouse. There is a delicate balance to strike between creating content that the algorithm likes and content that humans like. The 2 are often at odds with each other.

The algorithm is designed to show users content that is engaging and likely to keep them on the site for longer. This generally means content that is entertaining or informative. However, it also means content that is controversial or polarizing.

Humans, on the other hand, generally prefer content that is positive and uplifting. We are hardwired to seek out content that makes us feel good.

For any team or individual that want to get their content performing better Mandala really is the only tool you’ll ever need. Give it a go to see for yourself, it’s now free for seven days, so why not? 

Once you’re ready to sign up, plans start at only $49 per month, and there are custom plans to suit your needs as well.