This week, I have been taking a deeper dive into different features that social media management tools have to offer. More specifically, I have been focusing on keyword analytics. Digital keywords are something I am already extremely familiar with due to my job as a Digital Marketing Assistant. Finding the best keywords to sell our products is a huge chunk of what myself and my team do as part of the advertising/marketing area of the brand department.
Twitter Keywords
I am already relatively fluent in Hootsuite, but this week I stepped out of my comfort zone. I took a stab at Sprout Social, another amazing social media management program. Sprout Social has numerous features and options to ensure your content performs well on social media and helps you succeed as a business online. It even has insightful tutorials, videos, and articles to guide you through using the program. Sprout Social gives great analyses catered to each social media platform. I took a look at Twitter analytics and honed in on hashtags and keywords.
Twitter is widely known for being one of the first platforms to use hashtags out of all of the social media networks. The very first hashtag was in 2007, so naturally there have been some more created since then! I started my own Twitter analysis off simple, using keywords like “marketing”, “digital marketing”, “social media marketing”, etc. I wanted to make it relevant to my interests as well as my professional endeavors, all while not making things too complex.
In my own experience working with keywords, I know that they are not supposed to be too specific. Otherwise, they won’t work as well. Not too many people will type a dragged out phrase or sentence when they want to find something. Most users make a straightforward search when looking for a straightforward result (although there are always exceptions!). Having a little specificity is important, but as a general rule of thumb it’s important to keep things more broad.
My first few keywords perform pretty much as I expected. However, one surprising thing I noticed was how much lower “digital marketing” and “social media marketing” performed compared to just “marketing” alone. While these two are more specific, I still thought they would generate traffic in the same ballpark as the more generic term just because social and digital marketing are such prominent topics in our generation.
Then I decided to add a few more keywords to the mix. I used keywords like “digital branding” and “social media branding” to see if results would be drastically different than what I had so far. And, as I now suspected, plain old “marketing” still came out on top with a highest volume of 177,961 in the past month and a half. The branding terms that I added actually had little to no volume at all on Twitter, which came as a shock to me. Granted, Twitter isn’t the number one social media platform for online branding and creating a brand image (that is heavily Instagram-focused in my opinion) it is still a strong platform for representing a brand, so the lack of volume for those terms was surprising.
Amazon Keywords
At my job, we primarily use Amazon for our ads and to house most of our products. In order to generate optimal sales for advertising, we implement search terms into our ad campaigns that are relevant to each respective product.
In order to find keyword trends and discover the highest-performing terms, we utilize Amazon Brand Analytics. We can look up words that are relevant to a particular product and it will generate popular terms that accumulate a lot of clicks in a given timeframe.
For example, one of the largest product lines at our company is Waffle Wow, which is home to lots of novelty waffle makers for kids. If I search “waffle” in Brand Analytics, I can see which terms generate the most searches, clicks, and sales.
Additionally, many of our products do well for certain seasons or holidays. They can be used as gifts or accessories. If I look up “Easter” I can see all of the Easter-related terms that perform well and implement them into our ads if they are relevant. You’ll see that “Easter basket stuffers” is exceptionally popular.