If you plan to have any kind of digital strategy at all, you need keywords. But you can't just throw terms out into the social universe and hope they stick. You need to understand what keywords are relevant to you, your community, and your industry and how to organize those words and phrases to see pertinent results. Figuring out why keywords are used, how they'll be formatted, and determining the appropriate context will help you develop a list of terms that produce useful results.

Verticals Using Keywords
Keywords will overlap channels within your digital marketing strategy, so understanding how each of those verticals impacts your goals is important. We often get siloed into our roles as a social media analyst, SEO expert, or copywriter that it becomes easy for us to forget that these verticals all align.

• Social Media-You need to understand how customers will talk about your product or brand to track social conversations. In this instance, keywords aren't as much about how you would curate messaging for your brand, but how the average consumer does.
• SEO-Reflects how people look up your company through search engines.
• Copywriting-Whether you're writing a headline for an email, blog post, or even a tweet, understanding what grabs a reader's attention-and what keeps their attention-is a vital part of this process. You also need to be aware of what you want to convey to your audience and how that message might be received.

Developing a Useful List of Keywords
To determine the right keywords, you'll likely use a combination of tactics:

• Ask yourself:
  • How do you talk about your brand/products/services now in the media or online?
  • How do your customers talk about your brand/product/services?
  • How do you want to talk about your brand/products/services? How do you want others to talk about them?
  • How does your messaging compare to your competitors? How do your competitor's customers talk about their products/services?
  • How does your messaging compare to general industry conversations?
• Write a list of all the brand name variations you can think of. This includes plurals, slang terms, and hashtags or @ mentions related to your brand.
• Run a Google Analytics report to view search queries people used to find your website.
• Perform basic searches for words or phrases to see if and how people use them on social platforms.
• Understand the basics of Boolean logic to figure out how these terms can be optimized to work cohesively and produce the best possible results for your social listening.

Don't Do This
Keywords are not every possible word related to your brand and they are not generic terms that could kind of be tied to your brand, such as 'technology' or 'IT'. Try monitoring mentions of 'it'. Go ahead, I'll wait. Did your brain explode yet?

Planning for Conversational Noise
When thinking about how your brand is discussed online, it's easy to forget that there may be other meanings behind your brand name or keywords. That's why it is imperative to understand how your keywords could be used within other contexts. For instance, what is the first thing you think of when you see the word 'recall'? Did you think of a product recall or view it as a synonym for 'remember'?

Everyone is familiar with HP computers, but did you know that if you search HP on Twitter, 'HP' is frequently used as an abbreviation for 'Harry Potter'? Or that some people use it to abbreviate 'horse power'? Or that others, still, talk about 'HP Sauce'? This content, unrelated to HP computers, is referred to as "noise". Determining what you want to listen to is as important as understanding what you want to filter out.

Remember-developing keywords and their configuration is not a one-time event. People will always find new ways to discuss things on the internet, your competitors will be vying for the same consumer markets you're targeting, and search engines continuously update their data ranking algorithms, making this a cyclical process.