Social media posts and Google searches are often aligned. That may seem like a given, but it isn’t something that most social media marketers think about, but it should be! A recent study suggested that there are currently 75,000 Google queries per second, which means there has to be relevant keyword information available that can be used in order to boost social media engagement for your business. To really get an edge over your competitors, you should be analysing this data, in particular via Google Trends. In this article, we look at how best this can be done.

Using Google Trends

If you are familiar with Twitter, you will know that it has a trending section and Google Trends is very similar. Google Trends helps marketers understand what the most popular current search queries are around the world and is a crucial tool for keyword research. It provides keyword-related data including search volume index and geographical information about search engine users. You can type in a specific keyword on a given subject, for example, “rare book” if you have a rare book business and you will be shown what regions around the world have the most Google searches for that word, meaning you can then better tailor your marketing efforts for that demographic. There are some key areas where Google Trends can help with your social media marketing:

Campaign Planning

When putting together a campaign, using Google Trends is a great place to start. It will help you know where to find your target audience. It will help you understand what people are talking about and where exactly they are. These are valuable insights when it comes to planning a campaign. It will also help you check on why a current campaign isn’t working. Perhaps you are targeting the wrong location or not being specific enough with your audience. A true indicator of how successful a campaign is, is when your audience starts to spread your message for you. Google Trends can help with this as if you identify what your audience is already talking about, and contribute to that with your campaign then the likelihood of them spreading your content spikes.

Creating Hashtags

Google Trends is a great resource to ensure you are creating the most relevant hashtags. You can easily find keywords that are popular in a region or demographic that you intend to reach, and weave them into your social media posts as hashtags. Even though hashtags have been around for a while, they are still not widely used correctly, but with Google Trends at your disposal, you can ensure you have the most optimised and targetted hashtags for your campaign. Remember not to go overboard and start keyword stuffing, however, it is much more effective to have just three or four relevant keyword hashtags. Also, posts with too many hashtags can hinder readability even if they are relevant, so choose your best ones and insert those only.

Using Google Trends for SEO and other marketing activities

Google Trends is not only great for social media marketing but can be a useful tool for SEO and other marketing activities such as reduced cost-per-click (CPC) and increased relevancy (and Google Quality Scores) for search engine marketing (SEM). It really can be crucial for creating the right content and publishing it at the right time. It can be an excellent way to find a topic to write about or check the relevancy of a current news story for example and can be the perfect guide for all of your marketing efforts if you use it correctly.