Social SEO

Make content findable when people search, not just visible when the feed happens to show it. In 2026 every social platform is a search engine, and search is the highest-intent, most evergreen discovery there is.

Four truths shape everything:

1. All social platforms are search engines (TikTok/IG/YouTube/Pinterest/LinkedIn) — and people search different platforms for different intents. If you only optimize for the feed, you're invisible to people actively looking.
2. Keywords, not hashtags, are the lever. Write for the search bar first; hashtags are a minor category signal → hashtag-strategy.
3. Search optimization doubles as recommendation optimization — the keywords that get you found in search are the same signals the algorithm uses to categorize you for the right feed/FYP audience.
4. SEO turns posts into evergreen assets — a search-optimized post keeps getting found for months; a feed post dies in ~48h.

(Full model + the AI-search/GEO boundary: references/why-social-search.md.)