Search is moving to social. Here’s how to get your posts found

Ask a twenty-something where to eat in Brighton and they won’t open Google. They’ll open TikTok, type “brunch Brighton” and scroll. The platforms know this, which is why search has quietly become one of the biggest ways new people find your posts. The good news is that platform SEO is not complicated. It just needs doing on purpose.

Say what the post is about

Algorithms can’t lean on hashtags any more, so they read everything else. Your caption, your on-screen text, your spoken words and your alt text all get indexed. Write the way a person would search. “Our new summer menu” is nice. “Where to get brunch in Brighton this summer” is findable. Put the key phrase in the first line of the caption and say it out loud in the first few seconds of a video.

Tidy up the bits nobody sees

A few small habits make a surprising difference:

• Add alt text to every image, in full sentences, with the place or product named.

• Name your video files properly before you upload them, not IMG_4471.

• Keep your bio keyword-rich but readable. It’s indexed too.

• Use one or two topic hashtags, not thirty.

Measure what search is doing for you

Instagram and TikTok both show you where views came from. Look for the share arriving from search and keep a monthly note of it. When one post keeps getting found months after it went live, make more of that. Evergreen questions, how-tos and local guides tend to be the posts that keep paying rent.

If you’d like us to run a search audit on your accounts, drop us a line at hello@lido.example.