A client wanted some guidance on keywords to use in their social content to help reach their audience. I included this disclaimer / calrification in the deliverable:

From an SEO perspective, the ultimate goal is creating useful content for users / readers. Keywords should support the discoverability of the post / page without detracting from the user’s experience.

From a social perspective, keywords and hashtags are diminishing in important as the contextual matching power of AI is further integrated into the search and discovery engines powering the most popular platforms.

According to Social Media Today, LinkedIn has basically said hashtags aren’t needed anymore. And certainly don’t need to be used if the keyword(s) that would be used as a hashtag already appears natively in the post text. The platform’s search tool is less keyword driven and moving more towards context and query concepts.

AI turbocharges the contextual understanding and targeting of web platforms.