Social SEO: Why Brands Are Thinking About Keywords on Social

Picture this: You’re craving homemade sourdough. Awesome. You Google “best sourdough recipe” and land on a blog post that starts with a traumatic childhood memory, three ads for air fryers, and a paragraph about someone’s emotional relationship with flour. Somewhere beneath all that is the recipe. This experience is so common that it has become a cliché now. Technically, this is “good SEO”. In reality, it’s digital hostage negotiation.

Now you’re annoyed, so you bounce. You pop over to Reddit. You search the sourdough communities there and immediately find a thread full of real bakers chatting. They’re sharing palatable, no-BS tips. Somebody admitting they killed three starters before figuring it out. It’s crowd-sourced advice, the good stuff.

But wait, you don’t just want to read about it, you want to see the technique. Then you head to TikTok because reading about sourdough is one thing. Watching someone aggressively slap dough on a kitchen counter is another.

Within seconds, you’ve found:

• the jiggle test

• how wet the dough should look

• what beginners usually mess up

• comments arguing over whether any of this matters

And honestly? That feels far more trustworthy than a polished recipe blog optimised for Google in 2017.

Nearly half of consumers (49%) now use TikTok as a search engine, up considerably in just two years. Among Gen Z, this behaviour is even more pronounced, with 86% searching on TikTok weekly, almost on par with traditional search engines

The trend here is that people are bypassing the traditional search and going straight to communities (Reddit) and creators (TikTok) for relevant, useful and entertaining content. For brands, this is huge. It means you can’t just game the search rankings; you have to actually be where the conversations and quick answers are happening. These social platforms aren’t just for fun anymore; they’re becoming the new search engines.

And the searches happening there are different. Google is still where people go for facts. TikTok and Reddit are where people go for reassurance.

“Is this actually good?”
“What does it look like in real life?”
“Which one should I buy?”
“Is this worth the hype?”
“What’s the best one for me?”

That’s a very different type of search behaviour. And most brands are still wildly unprepared for it.

According to Refluenced’s Found or Forgotten 2026 report, 4 in 10 brands are completely invisible in TikTok search.

Not underperforming. Invisible. Most brands still treat social media as a broadcasting channel rather than an information channel. They optimise for reach. They optimise for trends. They optimise for the algorithm.

Meanwhile, people are literally typing questions into the search bar.

And the reason is simple: the Entertain or Die 3.0 report shows that 80% of TikTok users open the app seeking entertainment; on Instagram, 65%; and on Facebook, 55%.

Because of this, we’re seeing brands focusing on entertaining content in hopes of showing up on people’s FYP or Explore pages.

However, for them, this is a huge opportunity to improve social discovery by creating content that is both platform-native and searchable on social.

What is Social SEO?

For years, SEO rewarded whoever gamed Google best. Social search rewards whoever explains things best. And unlike traditional SEO, this content doesn’t need to sound robotic or corporate to rank. In fact, that usually makes it worse. Nobody opens TikTok hoping to watch a resized TV commercial with subtitles.

It means understanding what your audience is searching for, what they actually want to see, and creating content that matches that intent so your posts show up in the right places at the right time.

You still don’t want to treat your Instagram captions like a boring blog post or cram them with so many keywords that people just scroll past. Keywords are important, though, they’ll help your content pop up in search results.

But here’s the thing: Engagement signals like saves, shares, and how long people actually watch your content also clue the algorithms in on how useful your post is. That means your social media strategy should make people feel seen, entertain them and provide something useful, so it’s more likely to appear in internal search, the explore page, and suggested feeds.

How do you find what people are searching for?

To create content that people will actually find on social media platforms, you need to know what they’re looking for.

At Kaizen, we use TikTok Creator Search Insights to see what’s trending on the platform. We also use tools like Keywordtool.io and Google Trends. These help us compare search popularity over time and in different places, showing us what people are searching for right now, so the content can be there when they need it.

But there is an important catch here. Most brands approach social keywords the same way they approach Google keywords: By chasing the biggest terms. They compete for the broadest searches, hoping visibility follows.

Which sounds logical until you realise you’re competing against millions of creators who naturally speak the language of the platform better than most brands ever will.

A creator filming in their bedroom, explaining “the best white trainers for wide feet,” will often outperform a polished campaign video approved by 14 stakeholders and by somebody from legal who fears joy. That’s because social search rewards relevance and authenticity more than pretty visuals. And increasingly, people can smell overproduced branded content from a mile away.

How Brands Actually Win?

1. Own the Conversation

Brands that win move beyond high-competition keywords such as “best white sneakers” and win surrounding searches.

According to Refluenced’s Found or Forgotten 2026 report, all too often, while one keyword is contested, the surrounding cluster, often representing millions of views, remains largely unclaimed.

That’s the opportunity. Most brands are all fighting for the same tiny piece of internet real estate while massive adjacent search behaviour goes largely ignored. This means brands need to rethink how they brief social content.

Instead of briefing “engaging skincare content,” the smarter approach is briefing around specific searches people already make:

• “morning skincare mistakes”

• “how to stop makeup separating”

• “best skincare for oily skin”

• “why my foundation pills”

Each piece of content then becomes an answer to a specific search. You’re creating different angles around the same topic, which helps strengthen the wider keyword cluster over time.

The bigger change here is thinking about long-term visibility. On platforms like TikTok, content keeps getting indexed, ranked, and resurfaced long after it’s posted. The more content a brand creates around a connected topic, the stronger those search signals become, helping the brand build a bigger presence in search over time.

2. Act Like Creators

This is the uncomfortable part for brands. Social media search is largely a creator ecosystem. And creators are winning.

According to Refluenced’s report, 99% of top-performing TikTok search videos come from independent creators. Out of more than 1,000 brands tracked, only 135 had any meaningful ranking presence. That’s a brutal statistic.

Because it means brands are competing against people who move faster, understand platform behaviour better, sound more human and create content without turning every sentence into a compliance meeting.

Some top search results examples from different categories:

TikTok also behaves very differently from Google. Google gives brands multiple ways to appear. TikTok behaves more like high school. A small number of creators get attention while everyone else quietly eats lunch alone.

So the brands that succeed are the ones creating content that feels useful before it feels branded. It really resonates with people. They create tutorials, reviews, real experiences, and demos. These formats work because people trust practical, relatable tips. And when they entertain? They also hit the FYP.

3. Explicitly Optimise Content for Search Signals

Brands that succeed not only use search-optimised captions, but they also optimise the entire piece of content for discoverability. This means mentioning keywords early in the video, answering specific questions, and repeating those keywords throughout the video to signal that the content is relevant to that specific search.

For example, instead of posting a vague fashion montage with cinematic music, a creator might immediately say: “Here are the best sustainable fashion brands that don’t look painfully sustainable.” Straight away, TikTok understands what the content is about. So do audiences.

4. Create Content That Stops The Scroll

Once brands understand what people are searching for, the next challenge is creating content people actually want to watch. Because useful content alone isn’t enough.

The best-performing social search content usually does three things at once:

• answers a question

• matches platform behaviour

• earns attention quickly

Every content idea should ask:

• Does this clearly answer the search?

• Does this fit the format people expect?

• Would somebody genuinely choose to watch this?

That last question matters more than most brands realise. Because some branded “educational content” still feels like homework. Useful information delivered in the least entertaining way imaginable.

The strongest social search content usually balances usefulness with personality. It teaches something while still feeling native to the platform.

That’s why creators outperform brands so often. Creators understand pacing, humour, hooks, tension, and platform language instinctively. Brands often understand messaging frameworks and brand guidelines.

Those are very different things.

5. Test and Learn

Social search behaviour evolves constantly. The keywords people use change. The formats change. The style of content changes. Which means brands need to treat social SEO as an ongoing process rather than a fixed playbook.

• Test different keyword variations.

• Experiment with different hooks.

• Study what people save, share, and search for repeatedly.

• And most importantly, pay attention to what audiences respond to organically.

Because platforms are increasingly rewarding content people actively engage with, rather than content brands simply push hardest. If people find something genuinely useful, platforms amplify it. And that’s how visibility increases over time.

The Big Takeaway

Social media isn’t just a place to post an extension of your branded commercials anymore; it’s become a major search engine, especially for quick answers and “is this legit?” checks.

If your brand focuses only on high-competition keywords or posts content like TV commercials, you’ll be invisible. The brands that are winning are thinking like actual creators now, owning specific conversational clusters instead of just single keywords, and making content that is genuinely useful and entertaining. So, ditch the hard sell, give people the real-deal info they’re searching for, and you’ll start building visibility where it actually matters today.

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