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🔎 Your social posts are showing up on Google
Welcome back to TWISM!
About 3 in 4 Google searches show at least one social post in the top 10 results (Planable). That means someone can find your post by searching Google without ever opening the app you posted it in.
On Oct 2, Planable published data from 100,000 Google searches showing how often Google and its AI answers show posts from Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms.
These people aren’t scrolling. They’re searching for something on purpose. Answer their question in a post, and you’re in front of someone who already wants what you post, follower or not.
Here's how often it happens, which platform Google quotes more in your niche, and how to turn the questions you already get into posts people find this way. 👇
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📊 YouTube & Facebook are winning on Google by A LOT
Google showed a social or community post in the top 10 results for 76.73% of the 100,000 searches checked. (Reddit and Quora count as community sites here.) Here's how often each platform appeared (Planable):
Reddit: 46.28% of searches
YouTube: 30.79%
Facebook: 30.52%
Quora: 15.79%
Instagram: 7.54%
Pinterest: 6.85%
LinkedIn: 6.03%
One search can show more than one platform, so the shares add up to more than 76.73%.
Google's AI answers show social posts too. (For context: AI Overviews is the AI summary that sits above Google's normal results. AI Mode is Google's chat-style search.) Social links appeared in 67.66% of AI Overviews, 32.39% of AI Mode answers and 8.4% of ChatGPT answers (Social Media Today).
YouTube is the single most-quoted website in AI Overviews, at 16.2% of all the sources they point to (Planable).
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🍳 Food? Facebook. Careers? LinkedIn.
YouTube is the platform Google's AI quotes most overall. But in some topics, another platform's share jumps well above its usual level. Here's each platform's share of the AI Overview quotes in one topic, next to its share across all 20 topics (Planable):
Food and drink: Facebook. 29.11% in this topic, compared with 12.74% across all topics. That's more than double Facebook's usual share.
Fashion and beauty: Instagram. 14.73%, compared with 5.32% overall.
Travel: Instagram. 12.91%, compared with 5.32% overall.
Careers and jobs: LinkedIn. 21.42%, compared with 3.15% overall. LinkedIn barely shows up in most topics, so careers is where its posts get quoted far more than usual.
Sports and exercise: YouTube. 68.10%, compared with 49.48% overall. For a gym or coach, the answer belongs in a video.
Relationships: Reddit. 44.85%, compared with 23.46% overall.
In relationships and careers, a social post shows up in Google's top 10 for more than 9 in 10 searches, at 95.34% and 92.14%. Real estate sits at the low end with 32.70%.
If your business is in one of these topics, give that platform extra effort, because Google quotes it far more there than it does on average.
Your best LinkedIn post probably happened at work this week
The client call that went sideways, the Slack thread that fixed a problem, the thing you explained to a new hire.
In this free 45-minute live workshop, Renee Shaw from TL;DV shows you how to turn moments like these into LinkedIn posts people want to read, with real posts broken down and live Q&A for whatever’s got you stuck.
Thursday, October 22 at 1:00 PM AET.
Can’t make it? Don’t worry, register anyway and we’ll send you the recording!
💬 Your next post is sitting in your DMs
Here’s a workflow for deciding what to post:
Read your comments and DMs for repeat questions. If many different people ask you the same thing, others are likely searching for it too.
Answer each one in the format it needs. Some questions need a reply, some a post, some a video or a carousel. Be specific about the situation you're answering, because a specific answer matches a specific search.
Answer in the comments when a post isn't needed. A reply handles the one-off questions and saves your posts for the questions that repeat.
Keep a list of questions that keep coming back. Planable calls this a watch list. When a question repeats, it's ready to become a post.
Read the follow-up questions after you post. Each one points to something your first answer left out, so it tells you what to cover next.
💎 What worked for Planable: Planable published 25 LinkedIn articles from people's personal profiles. As of August, 8 of them had been quoted in 422 AI answers. Their YouTube videos, carousels and a subreddit hadn't produced results, and Planable says to treat the LinkedIn result as something to test (Planable).
🌱 Small accounts count too: Later's own data says 57% of the YouTube videos that AI cites come from channels with fewer than 100K followers. Cameron Miskho, Later's Senior Director of Strategic Consulting, says "There is no correlation between follower count and citation rate" (Later).
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✅ What to do this week
Find your topic in the list above. If it's there, that platform deserves extra effort. If it isn't, start with YouTube, the platform Google's AI quotes most overall.
Pull the 5 questions you get most often. Take them from comments, DMs, reviews or customer emails. Those are the questions people in your niche are likely typing into Google.
Answer one this week on that platform. Make one post, video or carousel for one question. The follow-up questions will tell you what the second one should be.
Later cites McKinsey research showing that less than 10% of what AI search says about a brand comes from that brand's own content (Later). So most of what AI tells people about your business comes from posts other people wrote.
The part I'd do first: answer the questions you already get before you try anything new. You were going to answer them anyway, so the only extra work is turning the answer into a post.
☝️ The one-sentence version
Google shows a social post in about 3 in 4 searches, so turn the questions your followers already ask into posts on the platform Google favors in your topic.
Tell me one thing: what's the question you get asked most, and where do you answer it?
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📚 Sources
That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"
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