Search Engine Optimisation is not just for your website anymore, you now need to use SEO for social media campaigns too.
Organic reach on social media is declining, but don’t worry, there is a way forward. You just need to shift your mindset, and add some new tactics to your toolbox of organic social tricks. In this blog, I’ll help you to do both.
Back in the old days, you could rely on organic social posts to reach a good portion of your target audience. Today, organic reach is down across all platforms, though it appears that LinkedIn is still flying the flag for natural reach, but for how long, who knows?
Where the game has changed for organic content is around how the algorithms work. After years of tuning and tweaking, and having been fed enormous amounts of user data, these sophisticated algorithms are able to identify what content will fly and what will fall on its face.
The slow death of the hashtag on social media
The rise of SEO for social media seems to punctuate the death of the hashtag, which is no longer an effective social media management tactic to increase visibility and reach.
Hashtags were really handy in the early days of social media before the algorithm existed, when platforms didn’t have an effective search function.
They were central to Instagram success for many years, with the advice being to use up to 30 per post, and championed in the early days of Twitter (now X) to group posts of a similar topic together. A few years back we even wrote a blog called “How to use hashtags on LinkedIn to attract your target audience” which is now sadly pretty defunct.
Social platforms don’t need hashtags to categorise content anymore. Instagram’s Explore page, TikTok’s For You Page, and LinkedIn’s recommended posts all work based on engagement and content themes, not hashtags. YouTube now picks up visuals and spoken words in videos to suggest relevant content.
Some channels are now actively playing down the use of hashtags. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said that adding hashtags to posts is not likely to help users receive more views on videos.
Pinterest has made similar moves to actively discourage users from adding hashtags to their posts and hashtags have never really worked on Facebook.
I no longer use hashtags on my own LinkedIn posts and the impressions and reach hasn’t been affected at all. If anything it has improved.
Platforms are now reading your content, not your hashtags, and SEO for social media is quickly replacing hashtags as the mechanism to make your organic content fly.
The rise of SEO for social media
All social channels now have excellent search functions, and users (particularly Gen Z and soon Gen Alpha) are using them heavily, entering full search terms, in the same way we’ve used Google search for years now.
Search Engine Optimisation, which used to only concern your website, now applies to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X (if you still insist on using it), Threads, BlueSky, Pinterest etc.
SEO for social media is now the route to organic reach across all these platforms, and one tactic you should be taking seriously.
This means treating your social media campaigns as if they were mini blogs or landing pages, and optimising your social content for the platform’s search function. Start with exploring search topics and intent to find out what your customers are looking for, and create content that speaks to their questions or interests. – This is broadly the process we follow for “traditional” Search Engine Optimisation.
Beyond conceptualising your content topics around what users are searching for, SEO for social media also applies to your posts, images, videos, captions/descriptions, podcasts, documents. Whatever content you are posting, can and should be optimised for channel search engines.
With text based content, this can be done by using the key terms/search terms in your content, and ensuring you speak to the topic or question in a thorough, valuable way.
Search engines can now also analyse the audio and any text in podcasts, videos and images, so you can optimise your content with the content itself. Additionally, you should also focus on optimising the descriptions and captions that accompany these content types.
Read our case study on how we built and optimized a podcast series for Marks & Clerk to see this in action.
In short, when it comes to SEO for social media, content strategy and considered execution has never been so important. Ensure that your posts, whatever kind of content they contain, explore the topics users are interested in, in a rich, well rounded, natural way, clearly answer the questions your clients are asking, and are presented in an attractive, clickable way.
The days of poorly conceived and executed content, stuffed full of relevant hashtags, simply won’t cut the social media mustard today.
There’s an added bonus for your Google rankings
For a while now, Google has been featuring social media posts in its search results, and is also using them as references when it creates AI overviews.
I’ve already seen this in action as one of my LinkedIn posts – What type of posts work best on LinkedIn – is ranking highly in Google search and the AI overview – driving visits to the post
Instagram posts to feature in search results
Instagram has now made a further move into search engine results. Owners of Business Profiles on the social media channel received emails informing them that, from July 2025, Instagram posts and videos will be featured in Google and Bing search results. This means that your content on Instagram now has a new lease of life as part of the search landscape. There could well be a situation where an Instagram post is outranking a website page in search, which is something we’ve begun to see with LinkedIn and Reddit posts already.
You see, SEO for social media generates additional exposure, gives your content a new life outside of the social media channels, and can help you gain even more coverage for your efforts.
