Crack the Social Search Code: Unleash Your Brand's Full Potential

hello. thank you everyone so much for joining us today. I am so thrilled to be welcoming two very special guests to our live stream. We have the wonderful Mickey Sim, who is the director of all things platform and culture in the Asia Pacific region, and Mark Langenfeld, who runs all things media for VaynerMedia across the Asia Pacific region. And I'm Abria Kini. And all I'll be doing here is introducing these two wonderful people.

Um, I'm the chief marketing officer and managing director for Latin America at Vayner and have the pleasure of working across many of our different business units and clients, um, on a variety of different initiatives. And one thing that we love to do at Vayner is give away some of our secret sauce for free to marketers who are curious about this kind of thing. And when I saw in an internal, um, message thread this deck that Mark and Mickey had put together on the idea of the new SEO on social, I was like, this is amazing. We need to scale this all across the world. This is such an incredible and insightful thing that natively and intuitively makes sense, but I think isn't talked about enough by marketers.

Um, I think we're sort of in this space of brand forensics and blurring the lines between the traditional worlds of Google and SEO and SEM and all that PPC stuff and the world of like our sort of traditional social, which was like posts and YouTube and TikTok and Facebook and Meta. And now we're realizing that actually Gen Z's favorite search engine is not Google anymore; it's actually TikTok. And depending on the world where you are, it could be a various other social platform platform. But sort of based on that insight, this team has crafted a really interesting and insightful presentation to walk you through how to think about the new world of SEO and social search.

So with that said, I'm going to let them take it away. Let us know what you think in the comments. Drop anything that you sort of is top of mind; we'd love to answer this. And it will be streamed later on YouTube and across our various social handles, so check it out, um, and make sure to send to somebody who might find this interesting. Amazing. Thanks.

A: So all of us here have tried to search for something on social platforms, whether it's a new Gen Z slang that we are trying to understand or even the trending filter, like the age filter that we've all tried before. But as a marketing discipline, social search is still very much in its infancy stage. For the longest time, we have separated social media and also search as different channels, sometimes even different disciplines with a separate budget line. Many brands also have a social media manager and also a performance marketer as two separate roles. But the reality is that we have come to a point where search itself is becoming much more integrated into the different platforms, such as like your social media platforms and also e-commerce platforms. And it's becoming much more fragmented today because people are now finding information across all the different sources and different channels. We are all searching everywhere. And as the social media platforms continue to mature, people are now enjoying using social media as search engines. And just like what A is saying, the younger generations, especially, are gravitating towards social; they're learning about brands and also products from real users who look just like them. In fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, right after Google. And you can even see YouTube shots display on the first page of the Google search results today. On the other hand, Google businesses also allow brands to connect to their social media channels to display the latest updates. So all of this shows that it's all integrated as a full Google ecosystem and experience. And these are all already happening now, today, before the search generative experiences, the SGE that we are all excited about, fully formed in the future.

What about social platforms? What are they doing in this space? They are also advancing their search capabilities to compete with Google for user attention and also usage as a search engine. So let's take a look at two of the products that the social platforms are building today. On the left, we see TikTok with its native social, um, search tool called Creator Search Insights. Internally, we say that it's still pretty much a hidden Easter egg because it's only accessible on the mobile app when you go to the search bar and you type specifically Creator Search Insights today. So once you do that, you can actually see suggested keywords that are based on the content that your channel is publishing on TikTok itself. So it's kind of like a FYP for your content strategy today. Pretty cool. On the right, in the Meta world, Meta also has Meta AI. And I'm sure all of us here have tried before. If you have tried Meta AI, type into the comments what you think about it. For myself, Meta AI is one of my new best friends. And this is a real screenshot from my smartphone itself, where I ask Meta AI to show me some cute cat Reels, and you can see here that it's showing me some suggested views on Instagram that I can explore. And this is really only the beginning. As these features become more advanced, we'll get more and more specific results here. And all in all, we see that consumers are now spoiled with choices on where they want to glean information and what kind of formats they want to receive information about.

Now let's take a step back. We always talk about reach, but how much of this reach is a vanity metric, just like tracking the number of followers? Because we achieve actual reach when we when our social media ads can be relevant to the audiences, when the content is useful, valuable, and also entertaining. So relevance is really key in the social media world today. And when we take on the lens of relevance, social search becomes a test of relevance. So what do I mean by that? We only take to search for something when we have a question to ask. So search-optimized content will always always answer potential questions, such as inspirations or product research. For example, I might be looking for a new destination to travel to; product information and use cases; for example, I might be looking for whether the hotel actually has a bathtub inside; for user reviews from creators who look just like myself. And all of us also go to social to find promo codes and discounts for the best prices. And all of these are actually content that is catered to consideration and conversion phases. And if we think about it, it's where social search also really serves, which means that if you're not relevant, you won't show up to where consumers are actively researching for information when they are close to making the decision to purchase, when they when they are close to clicking the button to make the sale.

And if all of these sound familiar, you are really not alone. When I first started my own personal career as a digital marketer, I spent quite a fair bit of my time optimizing all the web pages and articles to rank on Google Search. And perhaps some of you might have done the same as myself, too. If you have done so too, type in the comments here and remember how big SEO was back then, that it was the gold standard that every web page aims to do in order to rank on the first page of Google search to drive incremental traffic over time. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? While that's where social search is also heading towards, is going to be the new standard for social content, where all social content will eventually need to be optimized for search on their respective platforms that the content are posted on, just like web pages for Google. If you haven't done that yet, don't worry; everyone here today are all early birds, and it's best to start early to to allow all your content to be indexed on the platform search engines, providing the chance to capture views even after the content's initial posting period.

So how do we then optimize our content for social search? We want to start with formulating a social search strategy that supports your overall brand and also business goals. Then we want to implement this strategy according to how each platform captures the keyword and the topics. So yep, that's quite a bit of hygiene and also hacks there that we are going to share today within this call. And then we are going to measure success social search brings to your overall performance. And in order to make social search part of your strategy, we really first have to understand how the platforms build their search capabilities and what we really want to highlight is that more sophisticated platforms like TikTok and also YouTube are built on semantic search today, which refers to being able to input queries in natural language and basically asking questions like how you would ask your friend. And when we look at TikTok specifically, the search experience is also not only within the search bar and the results page. Hello Singapore has built a rabbit hole—an amazing one—that finds that allows users to find more content to watch within its platform. They allowed people to incorporate, um, such suggestions onto every short-form video and through the related search topics at the bottom of the video or even at the top of the search bar of every single short-form video that you're watching on TikTok today. And even within the comment sections, where more and more people are using it as a chat forum today, you see topical suggestions at the top and even highlighted keywords within the comments by the users. And all of these suggestions are auto-generated by the TikTok platform in order to keep the users engaged to open their app for as long as possible. I and it highlights an important point that social search, we are starting to move from just embedding keywords into also considering what kind of topics we want the brands to appear in. So see keywords more as a hygiene, but what you really want to aim for is to provide content that really answers the right questions.

So just jumping on this one, Mickey, we just go back for a second. This one's super exciting, like particularly when you're coming from like a paid media perspective, like looking at the scale that platforms like TikTok are creating. So when you think about Google, the opportunities to look for paid media opportunities to find, uh, incremental users and the right users, um, to be targeting to drive, you know, brand or business impact, you're very limited to the search suggestions and the search keywords that are coming up within those very linear kind of frameworks that Google provides. When you start looking at the opportunities that platforms like TikTok and others are starting to replicate, you can see that a single search query and then starting to look at the content that is on the back of that, you're seeing many many different avenues for TikTok to give users, uh, more browsing behaviors, more opportunities, and more stickiness on that platform. Now thinking, you know, a few years ahead or maybe even a few months ahead, I'm already thinking about, okay, how are these opportunities going to be integrated into paid media opportunities, right? And so how are we paying attention today for what could eventually be an underpriced opportunity for brands, advertisers, or influencers who are paying attention and taking advantage of new opportunities, um, so this one's super exciting just around how TikTok's creating more scale within search targeting from a paid media perspective in the future. That's such a very good point to note. Another difference that big—so big difference—that social search has over traditional search is that what consumers are looking for are not only answers, but they also looking for answers with entertainment, authenticity, and also relatability. So to Mark's point, we need to think about what the different strengths of the channels are when you actually want to invest in the different channels. And when we think about social search, actually, this is where, um, social search really stands out, being able to answer questions in the most human ways as compared to even web links or the e-commerce platforms. We talk about how search is fragmented in today's landscape, and as marketers, we have to cover more bases to be there where consumers are finding information. So it's really important to understand the different strengths of each of the platforms, formats, and also placements for social search. The human element is really the strength. So with that in mind, let's do a little exercise today where we'll use an anonymous hotel brand as an example to create a clear framework of the topics the brand wants to earn in the search presence space on social. So with this, um, anonymous hotel brand, we can look at it from four different buckets. In the primary category, you want to own topics around hotels and resorts because this is where you operate in, but also in adjacent and also related categories. Definitely, as a hotel brand, you want to look at travel and even wellness as well, because it's quite an important part of travel today as the topics that you want to look into. But at VaynerMedia, we always look at, um, cohorts to look to understand the nuances of the different audiences on social, so that is definitely something you want to bear in mind when you really research for your social search strategy. So think about the terms and the slangs your cohorts actually use. So some of these Gen Z cohorts could be using the term "adulting money," which actually refers to people being able to spend on their childhood dreams now that they have the spending power to afford them, or even as simple as like female solo travel inspirations as an area of topic that you want to focus on. And in product tutorials and use cases, there are so many people online trying to talk about how to get a free upgrade, so you might want to look into that as well. So this is just a very quick example that we have done today, then now. And we have talked about a lot about how we want to move from, um, keywords to topics, but still use keywords to your advantage because it's now a platform hygiene. So when we think about keywords that we want to use, always ensure that they are descriptive and also relevant. So you might want to go as specific as "best Italian restaurants in Chicago" instead of "best restaurants" or even "strawberry shortcake recipe" instead of "cake recipe."

Awesome. Jump in. And I'm going to jump in and go through like some of the platform implementation, and we're going to focus on a couple of examples, um, around where we see creators who are doing it well, uh, really well, um, for now we're going to really be specific on two platforms, uh, starting with TikTok. So jumping in, like just, um, you know, the first thing we want to make sure that brands, creators, anyone who's jumping onto these platforms, um, from a curation, um, creation perspective is ensuring that we've got that channel profile and that hygiene right. So looking at Michelle Gonzalez, so LAX to Luxury, um, does a really, really great job of this one. So we're going to highlight her for the next few pages, but you can see in her, um, you know, her tag name, the way she, um, features her profile, she's using a very smart use of emojis, right? So very much thinking of the airplane emoji as a symbol of travel and the type of travel content that she's creating. So even as you are scrolling very quickly through your, um, different social feeds, uh, you can capture that attention and understand very quickly what the type of content that she's going to be posting, right? Looking at to her profile and the bio that she's providing, she's giving very clear indications of the type of content she creates and some with the value propositions of why you'd be following this content, this brand, this creator, right? So, for example, you can see that she's going to be posting a lot about luxury travel tips around traveling; she's based in LA, so again, either if you live there or want to travel there, uh, which Mickey is in a couple of days' time, you know, she's a great creator to look at different tips and tricks of what's happening in the area. You know, she has some credibility by sharing her TikTok "Latinx Trailblazer," which is one of the kind of categories and awards that she's been part of. And again, that's just helping for anyone that has ended up on her profile page, you know, regardless of the content that she's creating, she's also creating that credibility and this new brand space that she's really going to be owning. And then you've got the opportunities to link out—excuse me—to link out to, you know, price promotions or different links, uh, via tools such as Linktree, uh, and that could be looking at how to discover their other social channels, maybe their blog or vlog or websites, um, or even discount codes on affiliates, right? That's very much my user behavior, and everyone's got different behaviors of when you jump into different channels. Um, I think jumping into platforms like TikTok and looking for, um, you know, things like discount codes and everyone trying to look at how we share value is a really great opportunity. And then we see just a bit further down is looking at how she organizes her content, right? We talk a lot about brands about caring less about what your grid looks like, you know, it was very, you know, early 2000s really thinking about what your Instagram grids look like and how you link multiple photos and images to create a bigger master image. Uh, that's something that we need to let go of because as we look at content creators, you're not just creating for a single set of audiences, right? Michelle here is creating for people who are into luxury travel that are into LA that are looking into other types of content, which I'll show you in a second. And so instead of like over worrying about what your page looks like, which most people don't care, they're just looking for the right content, um, and they're looking for that discovery. But what she's able to do—and a lot of platforms offer this—is creating playlists, right? So you can hear—you can see here below that she's got different playlists around content on Disney, on Queensland, on Maya Kabi, uh, etc. So you could bring in a different playlist on discounts, a different playlist on LA restaurants that you should be checking out, cultural events that are coming up, and always trying to make sure that you're updating these with the latest events, um, and then following that is the posts themselves. So Michelle does a great job of, you know, tailoring each thumbnail to ensure that you understand what each video is about, right? It's not just about her walking through the streets, but each one's going to be tailored to looking for the best shopping spots or the best eateries in each of the different areas. So again, a really great way of thinking, you know, when people land on my profile, how can I give them the greatest indication and value of what they should be expecting to see from me and the posts that I'm I'm sharing. And then how do we optimize for the actual content itself, right? So how we optimize for TikTok search and that search discovery, right? Very similar to the days of or the early days of digital and Google search and how we rank within search engine optimization, which is all about being able to be understood by the Google algorithms, we need to do the same thing for today's modern landscape, uh, and on TikTok. Some of the biggest things to focus on are things like native text on video, right? So what this is is the, um, highlighted here below is the, um, Bangkok thrifting or, um, in Hong Kong, which is kind of talking about like what is the type of content that you're seeing. So this is content that is based in Hong Kong; it's about thrifting, finding great deals. And what is happening is that the algorithms and the platforms are actually able to digest and understand the native text. The reason why we're saying native text is particularly for a lot of creators and brands that are looking to leverage, uh, content created on one platform and cross-post; what we are trying to implore is use those same videos, but make sure that you're leveraging the native text on video, right? All platforms are natively able to give you really great creation capabilities, and it's really easy to just do these quick edits before you repost across the different platforms. The next one is the titles, captions, and thumbnails, right? This is very much helping embed the keywords that helps aid in discovery, both by the platforms and algorithms themselves as well as the users. So really understanding like what is the type of content that this video or this, um, asset is going to be sharing with the people that we're reaching, right? So this could be things like the titles, um, here you've got some extra tips for getting your VAT refund when shopping in the EU, right? What's really clear here is we understand that this is about shopping; it's about getting your VAT refund.

It gives the platform and users indication of where should the platform be sharing this distribution. Right? We know that Michelle is based in LA, but she's just done a recent holiday into Europe, and so she's sharing anyone else that's traveling to Europe. This is how you can go about getting your refunds and getting incremental value, so you can go in, you know, continue on your shopping spree here as well, right? And the platforms are seeing this as content and able to categorize that and, like I said before, understand where and how to distribute this organic reach.

The next one is trending sounds, effects, and filters. So this is looking at how you can leverage the content that's already relevant within your searching topic. So it could be trending audio effects or filters that are already trending, right? This helps your content discovery beyond what would be the native search that people are finding your brand, but by leveraging trending audio, trending sounds, and filters, you can hopefully be discovered by more users that actually find your content entertaining, but they've been um discovered via a different uh kind of entry point, which is super exciting. Cool.

The last one is video and audio uh so what it is is the um the videos that are the visuals in the background, right? This is handwritten notes; this is billboards; this is content in the background. So in this video here, you can see it's within a shopping department store, and you can see sign here is talking about shoes, right? So this is the shoes category. Uh what's really unique here is that whilst you might be talking and using things like the captions uh to allow the algorithms and users to understand what content is um you the video about, but the algorithms are able to also index the surroundings in the background. Now this could be really key for wanting to show off content and areas that you're exploring, but even more so is by leveraging other platform features like such as green screens, right? So green screens is a really great hack to be able to bring in cont content um it could be headlines of articles that you want to talk about, um it could be other brands that you're reviewing and actually bringing in logos and that text. You're again giving another entry point for the algorithms and people to actually understand what you're talking about and help index you and make you more discoverable to more people, which is really the end game here. And you can also use the autogenerator captions to do a double check on what the platforms are capturing um from your video itself. Little tip there. Awesome.

So jumping into Instagram search, it's very similar in terms of a lot of like how we're optimizing the profile. So again, making sure that we're adding in the right keywords to rank for, right? So what is this page about? This is an example of the World Surfing League uh what they've done here is made sure that they've tag some of their other similar accounts, whether that's um WSL Pure, WSL Brazil, and that will be key for where their next events are coming up. They've given a caption around what you can expect from their page. So if you want to be looking at the world's best surfers or you just want to be ouling at the world's best waves, this is one of the destinations that you should be jumping to to see that. And then below this, you can see they've got the billong pro Pipeline and the dates, right? This was just based on the the screenshot that we took earlier, um but what they're also really good at is updating these links for what is happening um in the future, right? So they're always updating this, making sure that their hygiene is accurate and that they're um offering links to even live stream when they are live during certain events.

The one below here is again ColourPop Cosmetics. What they're doing is actually giving everyone a great indication of the type of category that they're in, right? Whilst their brand name might be ColourPop, you don't want to confuse them for a paint store, right? These guys are talking about cosmetics; they're talking about beauty and the different shades that you can expect from them. So again, it's just really helping understand um you know why we should be following these brands and what they're about and helping for content discovery again.

The next one is hashtags and keywords. Uh this is far more relevant in platforms like Instagram or X as well uh where we we are looking at that hashtags being your family and helping us understand you know what this content is about, right? So in this example, you've got um a piece about keto, and it's also got photography, would be seen as out of place, right? Um I would also, you know, warrant everyone to just be mindful of not tagging things like #FYP, so your for you page, uh just because it's completely saturated and you're not going to really be helping find more discovery by using very generic keywords or hashtags in that example. In this from in this example from Keto Diet Lab, they've done a really good kind of association tagging keto, which is the main part of what they're talking about, keto recipes, but they're also looking for people who might not be understanding of what keto is, but they're still looking for low carb diets and low carb food, right? Keto being a low carb um option and diet structure, uh you're helping to broaden the opportunities for people who are searching for your content whilst they might know uh the niche parts of your category or what you're talking about. So really thinking about you know who are the people who understand you, but then what are the other entry points to come and discover your brand.

The next one is tagging topics for Reels. So every time that you create a Reel, you're going to be prompted by Meta and Instagram around what are the the best topics that make sense for your content. Now, so before you're posting it, really helps the algorithm uh identify and categorize your video. Again, very very key for finding your initial organic distribution. Um the opportunities and the engagements that you get will also help dictate how much incremental reach you're going to be getting from these platform platforms, right? So what's really keen here, and we talked a lot of clients about, is not just worrying about the topics that are relevant for your brand and the category that you're playing in, but thinking about the cohorts and the audiences that you've created this specific piece of content for, right? So being a hotel brand, you're not just going to talk about travel, hotels, um lodging for example; you might be talking about luxury travel, or it could be inner city um destinations or beach holidays or island getaways. So trying to think about how else are we um categorizing this content. You could be using photography as that hook to try and bring in more travelers; it could be food, right? So you think about the the many different entry points, and by thinking on each piece of content and each Reel that you're creating, how do you want to index and kind of give that prompt to the algorithms of what your content's about to again help you get that incremental reach um which is super important.

And then the last one is tagging locations, right? I'm super guilty that when I'm looking for restaurants to go to, I'm not jumping onto Google; I'm not going onto websites and blogs to find what is the latest and greatest. I typically have an area or a destination in mind, and I'll jump into Google Maps, right? Or I might jump into the Instagram Maps feature and start looking for the restaurants or the style of restaurants that I want to find in the areas that I am happy to travel to, right? This is super super important and such a great and easy hack to just tag a location around where you are creating content or where the content is created for or the businesses that you are engaging with or reviewing uh as an example. So this is a huge one um and a great hack, and I just think there's a lot of usage behaviors. I'm sure lots of people who have dialed in here are thinking, yep, Mark, that's exactly how I'm using Google Maps to these days. It's not just about finding your way around cities but actually looking for inspiration and content there as well. Cool.

And now the last one is measuring social search success. Uh this is the big one. Like, given it is such a new field, such a new space, we're starting to look at what are some of the immediate actions we can do to start validating, you know, are we getting it right? Are we seeing incremental reach? Um I talk about organic reach being a leading indicator of success. If we all take a step back and think about platforms are not going to give you organic distribution, so you're not going to get reach, so that could be Reel plays and views, etc., in the platform if you aren't adding to the experience of the platform's users; if you aren't adding to time spent and stickiness to that platform, right? So we typically will look at an over-indexing rate that allows us to quickly identify when specific posts are outperforming our account norms. So when we look at this graph here on the right-hand side, each of these different bubbles represents a separate um organic post, right? Or a social media ad. Um the dotted vertical line looks at our account average, which is typically the last, you know, rolling two months in example, and what we see here are the two bubbles on the far right-hand side are getting significant over-indexed organic reach compared to the rest of the cluster and the the different pieces of organic content that this brand is creating, right? This gives us a really good indication that our content is being able to be indexed and understood by the algorithms, and they're giving us incremental reach, right? What we can do now, if we get super nerdy and super geeky, is starting to create taxonomies around the content that we're creating. So the blue one is um you know could be leveraging a certain keyword or certain hashtags, right? Have we tweaked and uh testing out different titles, captions, and headlines? Have we been playing around the headlines, the font used in headlines, the positioning um of any in-image text overlays, the captions, or trending sounds, right? This is a non-exhaustive list, but just a bit of a quick get-started guide around how we can start looking at how we index our content and the things that we are seeing and the things that we're talking about with the platforms themselves on what is driving organic distribution.

Furthermore, that we're seeing um lots of insights that are coming through new platform reporting features, right? Some of these are emerging, and we're always trying to pay attention like in platforms with all the insights and reporting features that they're getting us, right? The notable future metrics that we're keeping an eye on in terms of how we're measuring the impact on social search optimization will be things such as the distribution of views that we're getting from the search functionalities within each of the different platforms versus the organic distribution we're getting from the For You page, right? Um this again, the more that we try and try and be indexed in search may see us shift that distribution um to be found via actual discovery and intent versus the platforms giving us that organic reach, right? On the right-hand side is a really great screenshot from Meta, so looking at the Reels insights, so Reels being one of the short-form video uh formats and looking at the distribution that we're getting between our followers and non-followers. This is something that I'm super passionate about talking about with brands today. Uh so many brands are stuck in the way platforms operated, you know, 3-5 years ago where your organic posts, so your non-paid media ads, uh would only reach the people who you are connected with or your followers or your friends, right? We have shifted into an interest graph, um so basically the organic distribution is seeing, you know, more posts based on the type of content that you've been engaging with, right? So this is the example um from one of our you know friends at Bay Media that looking at this account reached 42.4 million accounts, right? This is not 42 million Reels watched or plays; um this is organic actual accounts being reached, and if you can see even down below the bottom, you can see 0% of these people were followers, right? So any content creator, any brand, any advertiser who is really worried about, oh, Mark, I really need to drive my followers because that's going to get me more organic reach, like like this is pure proof that that is not the case. You can get so much significant reach uh just by getting your social search optimization right, allowing the platforms to index your content and find that discoverability, right? What this is another proof point again is not over-worrying about putting out a piece of content and saying, I really know this is hitting; I know it's got some cultural relevance; I'm leveraging a lot of the platform features, and you shouldn't be afraid to take that post and DJ it. What I mean by DJing it is maybe try a different thumbnail; maybe try a different set of captions and repost it again. No one is going to be over-worried about seeing the same style of asset being used multiple times in your profile page or in your in your grid, right? Because a lot of the distribution you're going to be getting is from absolutely net new people, right? You can then mine these insights to further enhance your creations, understand what is working well, uh and help you just continue to perform and get more organic reach um again, uh which is, you know, what we're all trying to do here. Cool.

So social search optimization um again has the power to maximize reach, enabling long-term growth. Very significant statement I think coming from a paid media guy to say, you know, not everything just needs paid media to get reach. Uh those days of TV where you had to pay to get distribution are gone. Uh you can definitely leverage the capabilities within platform to get significant reach, right? We just showed before you can get 42 million reach accounts reached, which is pretty significant. And then jumping into the next one, so when done right, social search optimization will give you that uplift in your baseline performance. So I showed you that dotted vertical line around your current organic reach, right? What this is something we can continue to refine, and you'll continue to see gains in the number of re um users that you're able to reach and ideally the impact that you can have on driving your brand your brand awareness or your business goals, whether that's sales or return on ad spend.

And then this one is just jumping onto a case study, um so again just looking at social search and organic to jump start our paid ads. Um for me, I don't know if it's working for everyone, but I can't see the gift that's playing, but what we're looking at, what we should be looking at, is an example from WingStop, um who does amazing content where they have leveraged their learnings from organic search and they have found a specific um trending cultural um kind of format and leveraging the right interactive add-ons, a trending sound to get really really significant over-index reach. And what the team have done is working very much connected with a paid media team is saying, this is the best piece of content; we don't need to do trial and A/B testing with paid media; we've done this organically; this is the best asset. The paid media team were then able to take that over-indexing asset, leverage interactive add-ons that are available within the platform tools for paid media um to allow you to add things like interactive add-ons. So it could be, and you can see just a glimpse of it; it's the top right um kind of tile within that screenshot; you can see the sponsor that has the tile that says order now. Um it has a great display card; it's about you know talking about how you can order your box of wings, um and what we're seeing here is by leveraging the social search optimization by only putting paid media behind what we know is already hitting within our cohorts and within the platforms that by the time you put paid media um investment behind it, we're seeing a 69% increase in overall TikTok return on ad spend. So that acronym of ROAS is your return on ad spend and a 40% reduction in their overall TikTok cost per order, right? So all the people who are ordering are now being more efficient in terms of the way that we're reaching them, right? Very much of a sign that we're seeing that creative is very much a variable in even the CPM that you're paying in paid media, right? So the things, the cost that you're paying to get this ad distribution out there, uh and then it's almost like compounded interest where your results are going to be even better when you start looking at lower-funnel metrics like return on ad spend. So looking at a comparison of quarter-on-quarter, we're seeing that the um you know the same feed style of campaigning Q4 versus Q3 saw a two times lift in return on ad spend and a 58% reduction in your cost per order. So again, any teams that are looking at you know how do we win in organic search or or social and how do we make our paid media buys more efficient, the number one hack is to bring these two teams together, right? To leverage the insights to inform what you actually start putting into your paid media um to see really compounded success.

And then lastly, you know, the opportunity for when you get this right: number one is better quality content and engagement as validated by real people, you know, this isn't other offline surveys; this is actually real engagement and real platform distribution, and you can get immediate feedback on this one; you don't need to be waiting two weeks for different um you know brand lift studies to come back. You can see, by what we've shown you, significant gains in organic reach when we start leveraging the best-performing assets. We see increases in your paid media efficiencies as well as effectiveness. You'll have higher ranking for sales and conversion opportunities. And then lastly, is the opportunity for brands or even content creators who are joining in this session as well is to really own a space as an expert, right? Looking at Michelle Gonzalez that we shared before, so LAX to luxury, she's very much seen as this you know pinnacle point of content creation as well as authority in looking for travel luxury tips and advice within her category, right? So a lot of brands that are fighting for attention in a lot of linear offline or digital channels, um by jumping in in social search, and again this is relatively early for the space, you can really help impact your brand positioning and start being more relevant uh to more consumers. Awesome.

So with that, just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has joined us um across all the different time zones. Uh hope you enjoyed that. As Avery was mentioning earlier, we are going to be um reposting all of this um this feed across both LinkedIn as well as our YouTube YouTube channels, um so please jump on and you know follow us and rewatch if you missed the beginning of this one. And I think Mickey and I will also do our best to address some of the questions and the comments. If we don't do it right now, uh we might be at time, but we can jump on this and reply on the comments as well. Thanks everyone, have a good day and good evening.