3 Steps to Driving Traffic From Social Media

Just finished reading Neil Patel’s excellent article: Stop Guessing: Here’s a Social Media Strategy That Works. Below are my take away thoughts.

1. Understanding your Traffic
   1. Use Alexa and Google Adwords to study traffic demographics of popular sites that offer what you do.
   2. Questions to answer about your traffic (Design a survey): Why do they want to learn about your services and benefits (problems, wants, curiosity)? How important is your service to them? How do they like to learn about things? What common questions do they have about your service? How knowledgeable are they about your service?
   3. Learn more about target population. Search Reddit to read what your audience is asking about problems, needs, wants, and solutions. The upvoted answers reveal what and how (video, text, images) they like to learn.
   4. Visit forums used by your target audience. Google search for your target audience and buzz phrases.
   5. Visit top rated competitor website.
   6. Review online comments made by your audience.
   7. Discover the top one (or two) social media hangouts are for your audience. Use BuzzSumo or Ahrefsto find out where the top competitors are concentrated.

2. Build your traffic
   1. Create a library of content. Use content valued by your traffic.
   2. Publish consistently. It is important to be publishing fresh ideas of value to your audience. Use a 20% (1:4) balance of personal self-promotional posts (1) and shared posts (4). Identify the top10 to 20 keywords used by your audience to find shareable content most valued by your traffic.
   3. Optimize the frequency of your posts for maximum responses.
      1. 5 pinterests a day
      2. 3 twitters a day
      3. 3 Google+ posts a day
      4. 2 Facebook posts per day.
      5. 1 LinkedIn each day (20 times per month).
      6. What about You Tube?
   4. Optimize the frequency of your posts for maximum responses.
   5. Optimize the timing of your posts of for maximum responses. Use followerwonk to find the time of day most of your traffic visits uses your website and social media by going to Twitter account and clicking on analyze tab. Use Buffer to automate tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to be released at best time.
   6. Publish pictures, videos, quick tips, commentary, quotes, jokes, etc.
   7. Follow as many target users as possible to get follow backs on You tube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
   8. Link to other authors, and let them know that you are a fan of theirs, read their posts, share their posts, and say “I would be honored if you checked it out. And if you love it, feel free to share it on the social web.”

3. Track your traffic
   1. Record and study your results for social media traffic and for web site visits.
   2. Buffer gives stats on social media data and Google analytics for website traffic.
   3. What did you do that resulted in the most responses?
   4. What did you say, and how did you say it?
   5. What referrals generated the most traffic?
   6. Learn from the data, make adjustments, and maximize your traffic.