Traditional search and social strategies are rapidly changing, with Gen Z behavior accelerating a need for brands to shift how they operate. What led us to this new landscape and how should brands adjust their approach to take advantage of it?
What We’re Seeing: Search Turns Social
Consumers are shifting to social media over search engines for brand discovery. Social search is no longer a niche method of information gathering and brand discovery. Instead, it’s quickly becoming an integral channel that consumers consult to make decisions, as research recently published in emarketer and Forbes shows:
- 24% of people primarily use social media to search online
- 44% of Gen Z say they find new brands daily on Social Media
- 20% of people don’t feel the need to use search engines, as they can access websites through social media
It’s clear that Gen Z is leading the change here. They are less reliant on Google, with a decline of 25%, on average, in using Google for search between Gen Z and Gen X. Additionally, while 84% of the population still turns to search engines for brand name searches, there was a 30% decline in using search engines for this purpose between Baby Boomers (94%) and Gen Z (64%) in 2024. (source)
Looking deeper into this demographic, Activate Consulting’s recent 2024 Consumer Technology & Media Research Study found that Gen Z prefers social to search for both inspiration and research when shopping online:
Also of interest is which categories and topic areas are benefiting from this shift more than others. Research here shows that areas like ‘gift ideas’ and ‘hair and makeup’ show larger discrepancies than some others when comparing TikTok search to Google. However, it’s reasonable to assume that other, more visually-driven verticals—like recipes or fashion—may begin to increase their share of social search in the coming years.
Before exploring the opportunities and platform capabilities to facilitate search visibility within social spaces, it’s important to note that this behavioral shift from traditional search engines to social media isn’t contained to just brand discovery and shopping. Overall information consumption habits continue to shift dramatically toward social media over traditional sources. The Pew Research center has found that around 4 in 10 young adults in the U.S. now regularly get news from TikTok. Regardless of what TikTok’s future holds (ban, sale, etc.), this behavior has significant implications for brands both creating content and sponsoring content about relevant news and culture developments. A conversation for another post.
Platform Opportunities: Exploring new technologies and integrations
As search behavior grows on social platforms, many are beginning to adopt new capabilities and offerings.
In April, Meta integrated their Llama 3 AI into the search functionality across their app ecosystem. Ideally, this will increase the accuracy and relevance of results while also providing a new utility directly within the apps for users. At minimum, it will be a new data collection portal for the company to leverage in ad products or beyond.
Similarly, Reddit has launched a new AI driven search tool within their site to help surface relevant answers and information across their audiences. Brands may have opportunities to be discovered within specific communities and topics surfaced through the answers interface.
Lastly, we see TikTok going straight to monetization having introduced a new “Search Ads Campaign” offering which enables brands to gain more control over targeting and bidding, making it easier to reach high intent customers. eMarketer has said that early results yield an average rise in conversions of 20% for brands running Search Ads in addition to in-feed ads. Although TikTok’s future remains a bit murky at the moment, they are setting a precedent for what other U.S. social media companies will likely offer in the near future if they don’t already.
While each of the updates discussed above look to intersect search behavior from different angles, they all point toward a more search-forward experience growing across platforms.
Recommendations: Best practices for content development
With behavior shifting and platforms testing new features and products in response, brands should be thinking about how to approach their social content with a search-first mindset. This is easier said than done, but a few areas are emerging as wise steps to take.
- Creative Curation. Similar to foundational SEO work on web, social content striving to surface via search should leverage keywords, hashtags (when appropriate), and conventional topic research to understand what people might be searching for around a topic (i.e. How To’s, Tutorials and Walk-Throughs, Brand Comparisons. Before vs After, etc.).
- Tapping into Micro-Influencers. Ensuring content is engaging is critical to have it surface in any social algorithm. It’s now well known that influencers can often serve as a shortcut for brands looking to produce more authentic and interesting content. For discovery purposes, micro-influencers specifically can be a good choice. Harkening back to traditional SEO—where capturing the ‘long-tail’ of queries can add up to authority and visibility—in social, deploying a sufficient amount of micro-influencers focused on various niche topics and audiences can help add up to better discoverability at a more reasonable cost than other macro or celebrity options.
- Activate the Right Channels. In addition to organic optimizations and influencer usage, brands need to consider supplementing their paid social strategies with search-forward channels and placements. YouTube and Pinterest are of course massive search engines and should be leveraged for ad placements around relevant topics and interests. Similarly, ads can be run directly in search on both Instagram and, for now, TikTok.
For the brief moments when the scroll stops and searching begins, these approaches can ensure brands don’t find themselves left out of view.
