Best way to research the social potential of content (NOT just search potential).

[reidsteven75]

I'm wondering if anyone in the community has found a good method for researching the social potential for content.  I'll break down what I'm asking exactly so it makes more sense.

In order for a page to get ranked highly on Google for a keyword it needs authority (usually). With social media having an ever increasing impact on the authority of content, creating content that has social value (shared, liked, talked about, etc) can really help increase the authority of that page in Google's eyes.  In saying this if content is created that people search AND talk a lot about, it's authority will rise quickly, thus getting traffic through that keyword is easier and faster (not to mention your link building happens for you organically).

I've formulated a pretty good keyword research process to find the search potential of creating content around that keyword; however I am looking at how to research the potential social value of content.  I'm thinking the best way would be to crawl the social platforms and find trends in what people are talking about for the last x amount of time.   Must be some patterns to look for in things like hashtags.

At the end of the day I'd like to have content created based on both search keyword and social research.

I'm looking for advice from people who have found a good way to do this social research on what they look for / what tools they use.

[jesse-landry]

I have one word for you: REDDIT

Daily perusing of reddit will keep you up on all of this. Also, sharing content on Reddit will let you know quickly what's worthwhile and what's not.

There isn't a fancy tool that will do it for you in my example. I just think reading the reddit pages for 15 minutes a day will do you so much good in this regard.

That's all my input.

[Chris.Menke]

I'm wondering if creating content to fit what's trending is a solid organic SEO concept. By nature, trends are fickle, while SEO is a strategy play.  The topics that are trending today: 1) May not be relevant to your business and 2) May not be of interest to your audience. Maximizing social is not about getting in front of as many people as you can, it's about getting in front of as many of your audience members as you can. Most business owners don't tend to be keen on marketing to people who are never going to buy their product.

Yet the stuff that that is relevant to your specific audience is certainly floating around in social media.  In fact, it's likely  that it's being talked about, commented on, shared, liked, +1'd, tweeted, and otherwise engaged with in social media at this very minute.  The key is to have a clear understanding of who your audience is and what kinds of content they like, what they need, what they don't need, what's important to them, what's going to help them chose to buy your product. It's research into those things that's going to pay off best for the marketer and the business owner.

[reidsteven75]

I'll check out reddit.  I've heard of some good growth hack stories through utilizing that platform.  Thanks!

[reidsteven75]

I agree it's best to communicate with people that actually need your product; however I'm talking from an SEO point of view on authority.  Let's say you sell a product that uses a certain type of technology.  For example you sell an electronics product that utilizes a new open-source logic board.  The people you sell this electronics product to might not care about, or be talking about the logic board, but members of the open source logic board community would certainly be interested in hearing about an application built from it.

One of the big factors in SEO is the authority of pages and domains.  If the logic board community starts talking about your content about the application of their board, this signals to Google that it's an authoritative source of information, thus the domain it's associated with is authoritative.  While this might not seem the most productive in terms of getting sales short term, it raises authority which makes ranking for keywords easier.

I wouldn't make a piece of content unless it's clear from the keyword research that traffic can be created from it.  If it's easily sharable this raises the authority of that content in a fast, almost automatic way.

I guess a better way to ask my question is:  Is there an easy way to identify the kinds of things people are talking about on social channels?  Not only this but the people in your target market?

My goal is to create content around social trends on these networks that has high search potential in it's keywords.