Social media search engines: What they are & why they matter

Social media. Search engines. There was a time when these were two different things. But the lines are blurring between these types of online tools and the ways people use them to find information and content.

The top reason people use social platforms is still to be entertained. But they are also actively using social networks to search for specific information.

Social media search engines are the search tools of the future. In fact, for many social users, they’re the search tools of the present. Brands need to understand how to optimize their social media profiles and content to appear in those popular searches.

What is social media search?

Social media search is the act of actively looking anything up on social platforms by typing a query into a search box.

This is a more active method of seeking out content than simply letting the algorithms deliver what they think you want to see. More than that, it’s a new way of thinking about navigating the vast quantities of information available online.

In 2022, The New York Times declared that “For Gen Z, TikTok is the new search engine.” As Gen Alpha heads into the teen years, they’ll also become an important digital native audience for brands on social media.

Gens Z and Alpha want curated, easily scrollable results from brands and creators they trust. Social search far outshines traditional search engines like Google and Bing for those who want to discover, evaluate, and save information on mobile using just one thumb.

On the flip side, this means brands need to think beyond the algorithms – and beyond traditional search – to reach new audiences. As social media platforms become social media search engines, marketers need to embrace social SEO.

Why does social media search matter to marketers?

Monitor brand mentions with social listening

Understanding how people talk about your brand, product, or service on social media is essential. Social media monitoring and listening can give you a goldmine of actionable data. It’s the social search equivalent of Googling yourself.

Social search also determines what to include in your broader social listening strategy. Think hashtags, keywords, and accounts.

Each brand has its own audience, and each audience has its favorite social media networks. Social listening helps you understand who you’re trying to reach. This, in turn, guides where you focus your social searches and social SEO.

Before you start setting up your ongoing social media search tasks, spend some time defining your target market. If you’re targeting Gen Z, you’re most likely to find them on TikTok. If you want to reach women, the network formerly known as Twitter may not be your top choice.

However, keep in mind these are overall trends. Social listening and social search help you understand the social behaviors of your specific audience.

Social search also helps you identify the people who are talking most – and most positively – about your brand online. These are potential influencers and brand advocates to reach out to for partnerships or user-generated content (UGC) campaigns.

Reach more people with social SEO

On a recent trip to New York, I (a Gen X-er) was chatting with a local Gen Z bartender about what to do in the city. First, she said that I should search TikTok. Then she recommended I go to Summit One Vanderbilt since she’s seeing it on her own TikTok For You page on the regular.

Sure, this is just a one-off anecdote. But dig in here and you’ll see the layers of social search’s importance for marketers. Brand awareness through social search can look something like this:

1. Digital natives discover your brand through either social media lookup or algorithm-based content discovery.

Source: SUMMIT One Vanderbilt on TikTok

2. They share that information with other digital natives. But they also share it with others who don’t (yet) think of social platforms as their primary search tool. If they’re into your brand (or you reach out to them for a partnership), they may even start creating their own content about you.

Source: katecuppy on TikTok

3. Word of mouth drives social media account search for your brand – often by name. Those searches surface content created both by you and by other social users.

Source: TikTok

4. Social searchers like and/or save these posts and tag friends in comments like, “This is the place I was telling you about!” and the cycle begins again.

Source: TikTok

Source: TikTok

The important thing to understand here is that social search impacts your brand awareness. Even among people who are not primarily social searchers. And optimizing for the search function gets your content in front of people who were likely not already following you.

One other discovery path to consider here: TikTok, Instagram, and other social content can also be indexed by regular search engines and appear on traditional search results pages.

Source: Google

So, is this statement true or false: social media affects search engine rankings? True! We conducted a social search experiment to confirm this result.

Find insights about competitors

Want to stay ahead of the social game? Then you need to understand who the competition is and what they are doing. A social media competitive analysis relies on the insights you’ll find through social searching.

Social search helps you uncover the most relevant competitors in your niche. Regular social media searches can even help you identify new competitors as they emerge on the scene. Once you understand who your top competitors are, you can plug them into social benchmarking and analysis tools like Hootsuite Analytics to look for opportunities and threats for your business.

Entering the right competitors in your analytics tool can also help build out and focus your social search strategy by providing insights into the hashtags most commonly used in your competitors’ content. If you’re not already using, monitoring, or regularly searching these terms, you should probably start.

Looking at the bigger picture, analyzing your competitors through social media searches helps you understand what kinds of conversations typically happen on each platform among your target audience and the brands they love.

Understand what your customers want

You can learn a lot from the social media searches that drive people to your content, your competitors’ content, or any online conversation about your niche. And while that research can help you improve your customer service, that’s not all.

The social search terms and hashtags they use can provide important insights into the problems they’re looking to solve, the information they want to find, and the online communities where they like to spend their time.

Armed with this (free!) market research, you can position your product as a solution to their specific pain points, create online content that addresses their information needs, and connect to the relevant communities.

Research the right connections for social selling

Social media search is a valuable tool for sales professionals looking for new leads. Traditional search engines are not that useful when you’re searching for the right people within companies to reach out to. And company websites themselves often direct you to a generic contact form.

A tailored social search, on the other hand, can help you identify who to contact and give you some basic insights to personalize your query when you reach out. LinkedIn may seem like the top social platform to search here, but don’t neglect other social tools.

On the flip side, make sure your social media presence is easy for potential prospects or leads to find. Incorporate social search techniques into your bio and username across social platforms. Complete all available bio fields, make strategic use of keywords, and include a geographic location if relevant.

How to optimize your content for social search

Though social platforms and their search functions vary, there are a few universal tips you can apply to make sure your content rises to the top of the results page.

1. Optimize your profile. Use relevant, descriptive keywords in your name, handle, bio, About section, and description — anywhere you can. Don’t get spammy, obviously, but make sure that people AND algorithms can easily identify you and your niche.
2. Tag your location. Both TikTok and Instagram have robust location-tagging capabilities that can help surface your content to high-intent potential customers.
3. Add alt text. While primarily intended as an accessibility aid, alt text is also another opportunity to tell the social platforms what your content is about.
4. Include keywords in your posts. Using natural-sounding language, make sure to include the most relevant keyword in each post and caption.

Want more specifics? Check out our guide to social SEO or explore the details of Instagram SEO, TikTok SEO, Facebook SEO, X (Twitter) SEO, Pinterest SEO, and LinkedIn SEO.

4 best social media search tools for 2024

1. Hootsuite Listening Basics

Every Hootsuite plan includes Listening Basics, aka everything you need to get started with social listening.

Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.

You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.

Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:

• Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
• Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
• Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, social media channel, and more.

2. Social Searcher

Source: Social Searcher

Social Searcher is a multi-platform social media search engine that allows you to conduct a social media username search as well as look for mentions and hashtags.

The free social media search tool provides results from Reddit, Vimeo, and DailyMotion, and other web sources. A paid premium subscription opens up results from the true social platforms and allows you to set up email alerts.

3. Google advanced search

Source: Google

Does it seem counterintuitive to use Google for social media search, when we’ve just been talking about how social media is starting to replace Google as a primary search tool?

Even though social search is on the rise, Google is still the largest search engine around, and its advanced search capabilities shouldn’t be ignored. Plus, Google search and social search are interconnected. Knowing how to use both to discover social content will yield the best social media search engine results.

Within Google, use Boolean operators (like AND, OR and NOT) to focus on social search results. We’ve got a free Boolean search generator to help you generate search queries.

For instance, say you have an influencer in mind for a campaign but are unsure if they’re active on all the social media sites you’re targeting. Time for a social media username search!

Enter [influencer name] (site:instagram.com | site:facebook.com | site:tiktok.com) in the Google search bar to see if they have social profiles on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook.

Or maybe you want to find social media posts from fans of your brand? Add keywords like love, favorite or best to your search. For instance, searching site:instagram.com [YOUR BRAND +love] will generate Instagram posts from people who say they love your company.

4. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

If you need a more advanced solution, Talkwalker is your best bet.

Talkwalker’s AI listening monitors 30 social networks and 150 million websites globally, across 239 countries and regions. This includes blog posts, forums, videos, news sites, and review sites. It can also dig back into up to five years of historical data.

Of course, text mentions are just a small part of the conversation happening around your brand. So Talkwalker also “listens” visually to track any time your brand, logo, and even product appears in images, videos, memes, or GIFs.

Talkwalker is also one of the few AI social listening tools that literally listens—monitoring audio content in videos and podcasts for mentions and references to your hot topics.

Using the natural language processing capabilities of AI, Talkwalker can interpret human emotions—including irony and sarcasm—and include them into tangible metrics.

Source: Talkwalker

Talkwalker also uses AI to spot social influencers who have solid engagement, reach and relevance to your brand.

While most AI listening tools rely on third-party technology, Talkwalker has developed a proprietary AI engine (named BlueSilk) and trained it on over 3 trillion data points (nerd translation: that’s a lot!).

So if your organization has enhanced needs, you can tap into Talkwalker through its API, letting you directly integrate its data and insights with other systems. You can even build and train your own custom AI models, tailored to your specific needs, industry, and goals.

Finally, Talkwalker’s AI-driven crisis management tools can spot trouble early, by paying attention to anomalies in social data, helping brands put out fires quickly.

Refine your social media marketing strategy with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant results, engage your audience, measure conversions, and more — all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.

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