Distribution

What is Search on social?

Also called Social search, In-app search.

In one sentence

Search on social is the growing share of short-form traffic that arrives through a query typed into the app rather than through the recommendation feed. It behaves much more like traditional search, including rewarding older content.

Explanation

This is the reason captions, titles and spoken words matter more than they did. These platforms transcribe audio and index on-screen text, so a video that never names its subject in words is invisible to the query traffic even if it performed well in the feed.

It also changes the value of evergreen material. A video that answers a specific question can accumulate views for a year through search, which is a completely different lifecycle from the two-day spike a feed hit produces.

The common mistake

Writing captions purely for the reader. The first line is for a person and the rest is for a query, and treating the whole caption as copy leaves the search half unwritten.

Related

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Reading about it is the slow way

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