Social platforms are no longer just distribution tools; they have become search engines in their own right. Digital content strategy consultant Francis Jette is dedicating a new conference to this emerging trend of social SEO in order to increase organic discoverability. Interview.
We’re increasingly hearing about GEO, the equivalent of natural search ranking on generative AI platforms. Is there a link with social SEO?
Francis Jette: Yes, in the sense that AI will want to understand your entity in its entirety, which includes presence on different social platforms but also discussions around a brand. You need to ensure consistency in positioning across these different channels.
The idea of this conference is thus to bring marketing and communication managers to better understand the impact of topic selection in their content creation and how to structure their publications.
Are the rules of social SEO the same as SEO for online search?
Francis Jette: The fundamentals and objectives are indeed identical. Let’s take the example of a funny little video you post on social media. It’s cute, but does it serve a potential future social search?
We come back to the basic notion: what topics should a brand publish about on social media? I mean, in terms of strategic thinking in order to position itself on certain searches.
Managers place a lot of importance on this when it comes to SEO for a website. But this practice is relatively neglected in the social sphere.
Especially with the emergence of TikTok, algorithms are increasingly oriented toward the discoverability of content from accounts you’re not subscribed to.
Francis Jette: We see this indeed in the new features and UX of Instagram. Internet users can increasingly choose whether they want to expand their news feed and we’re moving closer to traditional SEO logic.
SEO results have begun to take up more and more space in social content. On Instagram, but also YouTube or Reddit, all content is now discoverable through SEO searches.
Hence the importance of ending what you call “soulless content.”
Francis Jette: Indeed. We talk about the importance of authenticity while on one side we find 100% branded, uninteresting content, and on the other, AI slop. We’re going to live in a world where it becomes so much simpler to produce content that the advantage will always be in favor of whoever is produced by a real person, with an assumed dose of imperfection.
In other words, highly human content will be highly differentiating. Which comes down to asking yourself what makes us unique as a brand and what allows us to truly stand out. Not publishing the same stuff as our competitors. This is one of the major challenges ahead!
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