Stop Guessing: Heres a Social Media Strategy That WorksbyNEIL PATELonJUNE 15, 2015

Everyone makes it sound so easy.Post a few times on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and the traffic will pour in.In reality, itsnoteasy. And like with anything else, you need to spend some time learning how to do it properly.I assure you its possible. My nutrition blog case studyreceived over 9,000 visits from Facebookalone last month, despite being a new blog.But as I noted in that second-month update, it could be doing even better. My friend Mike, who is running the site, is a really smart guy, but its still taking him some time to really understand how to use social media to its fullest potential.You should care about social media traffic because it is one of the biggest referrers of traffic at your disposal. In early 2015, social media traffic made up31% of overall traffic.Shareaholiccollected data from over 200,000 websites over the course of four months and found that Facebook alone accounted for up to 17.41% of overall traffic. And thats not even counting people who subscribed from Facebook and returned later:

While those other percentages might seem relatively small, remember that this study looked at a wide variety of sites.Given that the rest of the networks are less popular and more niche-specific, the results arent very surprising. For certain sites in the network of sites analyzed, the other networks would have made up a larger proportion of overall visits.Dont forget that this isquality traffic. While some types of social traffic have a reputation for being hard to convert, overall, social media traffic is very engaged.

You can build a business with visitors like these.And this is only the beginning. Social media trafficcontinues to growover time, so its never too late to get started.

But you need a strategy that works, which is exactly what Im going to give you in this article.Youll learn: The one reason why most blogs fail to generate significant traffic from social media The social media networks that are best for your business How to understand and engage your audience on social media How often you need to post and how to do it with minimal effort How to drive more traffic than youve ever have beforeLets dive in.Consistency is keyA good social media strategy will benefit your business in many ways: more traffic relationship building better customer satisfaction/retention better customer serviceIn this article, Im going to focus on the first benefit: getting you more traffic. We can go over the other benefits some other time.Heres the one key part of using social media effectively that often gets left out:consistency.If you follow all the steps in this article, you will have a complete social media strategy.If you execute it for one day, youll see no results.If you execute it for a month, youll see some results.If you execute it for a year, you will seesignificanttraffic.If youre looking for some magic secret, youre not going to find it. But if youre serious about building long-term sustainable traffic for your business, read on.Commit to the strategy we develop together today, and the results will come in the future without you having to worry about them.Step 1: Dive inside your readers mindsDo you think the average grandparent is on Instagram?Of course not.So, if you had a blog targeted towards the elderly, you would be nuts to start building up a following there. Youll never get any serious traffic even if you do everything right.The foundation of your social media strategy is to understandwhoyour target audience is andwhythey use social media. To do so, we need to utilize demographics and psychographics.Demographics tell you thewho:Demographics refer to statistics that describe a group of people. They include: location age gender income education level religion ethnicity marital status number of childrenNot all of these will be relevant to your business. For example, unless your business caters to a certain religion, any religious affiliation is irrelevant.Determining your demographics will depend on whether or not you already have a site and traffic.If you do not have a site or traffic yet, what you will need to do is find a similar site (as similar as possible) and use it for your analysis.If you have a site that does have traffic, you havea few options.First, you can useAlexa. Enter your site or a competitors into the search bar at the top. The more popular the site is, the more accurate the data will be.Since Nutrition Secrets isnt that popular yet, I could enter a competitors URL such asauthoritynutrition.com.

Another option is to use theGoogle AdwordsDisplay Planner.Enter in a keyword that describes your niche. I entered Healthy Eating.

Once you click the blue button to submit, the next screen will show useful age and gender information at the top:

Try several keywords to get a concrete idea of your target market.A final way to get demographic information is with Google Analytics (or your analytic tool of choice).In Google Analytics, navigate to Audience > Demographics > Overview using the left side menu. If you havent enabled this before, you might have to do so and wait 24 hours to get data.Once data is collected, you will see graphs for bothage and gender.

The best part about this data is that it representsyour actual audience.Its the best source of information for you, if available. You can also find similar data about location and language under the Geo section in your Audience panel.Record all this data in a text file or spreadsheet. So far, mine would look like this for the new nutrition site: Gender: slightly more female than male Education: relatively educated, but slightly less than Internet average. Location: most likely readers are from US, UK, and India. Age: average age is about 30. Very few elderly readers. Income: likely low to medium due to relatively young age.Notice that some of those parameters are more definite than others. The first time you do this, you will have to estimate some demographics. Over time, you should refine these as you learn more about your actual audience.Psychographics tell youthewhy:To truly understand how to create content and products that your target audience actually wants, youll need to understand more about your audiences outlook on life.Questions that you should try to answer include: Why do they want to learn about [your niche]? How important is [your niche] to them? (i.e., is it a hobby or part of their job?) How do they like to learn? (e.g., video, text, audio, etc., and on what type of device) What common questions do they have about [your niche]? How knowledgeable are they about [your niche]?This is a part that most business owners skip or skim over, but its going to be crucial for later steps in this strategy.The difficult part is that theres no tool that you can plug a site URL or keyword into and get psychographic information back. The only way to answer these questions is to observe your target audience.Before I go over a few places to do this, note that youmust find your exact target audience.If youre targeting those who are interested in eating healthy based onthe latest science, that group of people is going to be different from the group interested in nutrition because ofbodybuilding.Source #1 Subreddits:Start by searching your niche in thesubreddit search. Theres a subreddit for almost every community imaginable, which is why this is a good place to start.In my example, I searched for nutrition:

Based on these search results, I would stick with/r/nutrition. Try to find a relevant community with at least a few thousand subscribers.Next, you simply have to read.If youre not familiar with Reddit,read this guideto understand what youre looking at first.Pretty quickly, youll start seeing the same questions and answers over and over again.The questions and responses will tell youwhatpeople are interested in learning about, while the most upvoted answers will help you understandhowthey like learning about it.In addition, you can click the top filter at the top to see the most popular posts of all time:

Some subreddits will be dominated by videos or images. In this case, most posts are text or links to articles (that are supported by images). That alone tells you how this community likes to consume information.After looking at the first 100 links or so, I can already see that this community cares about: busting myths (i.e., cholesterol in eggs is unhealthy) the current nutritional guidelines (and why they arewrong) learning about nutrition (good courses and tutorials) creating practical, healthy, and enjoyable dietsAmong other things, I can answer almost all of those basic psychographic questions now and have a decent picture of what my audience believes in.This will also help uscreate content that resonates with ourreaders. Instead of citing the USDA (who they dont think is credible), I (or Mike) would cite research studies instead.Source #2: Forums.Another place where you can see your target readers interact is in a forum. Just search Google for [your niche] forum, and youll get a list of results.

Again, be careful that you pick forums that have the readers you are interested in attracting. Otherwise, your results will be inaccurate. Theres a big difference between someone learning about nutrition to just be healthier and someone looking to gain muscle.Source #3: Comments.If you can find a popular blog that relatesveryclosely to your niche, this may be an option.Using Authority Nutrition as an example again, I would read through the comments of several articles and record myobservations about the readers.Step 2: Choose your most effective channels, and double downLike I said earlier, this is a long-term strategy. You are investing time and resources into building a following on these social channels.Most businesses cant even do that on one social media site, let alone dozens at the same time. Pick one or two (maximum three)social media channels to focus all your efforts on.Dont worry about missing out on traffictheres more than enough traffic on any single major network to build a business. You will get better (and quicker) results by investing extra time and effort in a few networks than you would spreading resources thin across many. Choosequality over quantity.So, which networks should you choose?You need to find a network where your audience hangs out. For some niches, you might have several options. For other niches, there might be only a few to pick from.Start by narrowing down networks based on theirage:

Vine and Tumblr are usually better options for a young demographic, while Facebook and LinkedIn are better for an older demographic. Facebook is losing popularity with younger demographics, but70 percent of adults use it actively.In most cases, you want to match your audience demographics to thedemographics of a social channel:

But age doesntpaint a full picture. On a network such as LinkedIn, people are engaged in discussion about professional topics, but not hobbies.How to spy on your competition: finding a close competitor is by far the easiest way to find the top social networks to focus on.Say I wanted to attract Authority Nutritions readers. I would go to either BuzzSumo (free) orAhrefscontent explorer (paid) and enter in the URL.On BuzzSumo:

On Ahrefs:

Its clear from these results that Facebook isby farthe most important channel to focus on, which is what were focusing on in the case study.In addition, Twitter edges out Google Plus for second place. As we saw in the previous step, this niche doesnt rely on images heavily, which is why its notthatpopular on Pinterest.Step 3: Build a content bank of VALUENow that you understand your target reader a little better and have picked a channel or two to focus on, we can finally get to delivering value to them. The more value you can provide, the faster you will grow your presence.The second part of this is consistency. If you share content for a few weeks, then drop off for a month, you wont continue to grow. Unlike search engine traffic thatcangrow without you having to publish content, youmust be continuously active on social media to grow.In order to make it as easy as possible, you need to build up a content bank with tons of content that your target audience will love.Content could be any of the following, depending on the network: blog posts infographics pictures videos jokes quotes quick tipsThe right kind of content depends on your network. In addition, you cant just share your own content.Michael Hyattshares about 20 pieces of valuable content made by others for every piece of self-promotional content.Bufferposts about 90 percent of non-promotional and 10 percent of promotional content.Theres no golden rule of what the ratio should be, but always err on the side of being non-promotional, especially at first.What content, other than yours, should you share? To find out, start by assembling a list of popular keywords in your niche. Use the Adwords Keyword Planner to find them. Start with a seed keyword such ashealthy eating or how to eat healthy, and record the top 10-20 results. Record as many as you like:

While keywords might seem similar, they will produce different results in the next step.Now, go back to BuzzSumo or Ahrefs, and enter in your first keyword. Then, sort by the network you are focusing on.

In this case, I found the most popular content on Facebook about healthy eating. Record all of these URLs in a spreadsheet (you can click export near the top).If youre using a free account, youll have a limited number of searches per day, so just do as many as you can.At the end, youll have a giant list ofprovencontent that you know your audience will love. This will take some work, but it isone of the most important steps.Step 4: Get followers or get ignoredSharing content without any followers is pretty useless.Without people seeing, reading, and re-sharing the content you post, youll never build relationships, trust, or see significant traffic.Starting from scratch ishardbut possible. What you absolutely do not want to do is buy a few thousand fake followers from Fiverr. Not only will it make it impossible to track your results accurately but it will also lead tofewer followers seeing your postsbecause ofthe lack of engagement from those fake followers.For you, as for most networks, the most effective way to get followers at first is to simply follow as many of your target users as possible. A decent percentage of these will follow you back.As your follower count grows, you can slow down on following other people as the exposure from the content you share will start to earn you significant follower growth and traffic.Ive assembled some of the best resources on getting followers on each major network so you can plan your strategy to get your first followers.Get followers on Twitter: How to Get More Twitter Followers (The Ultimate Twitter Tips Guide) The ULTIMATE Guide to Getting Twitter FollowersFacebook is largely a pay-to-play site now. While its not extremely expensive, you need a few dollars a day to run Facebook ads.

Regardless, here are some great resources that will help you get more followers (page likes) on Facebook: How to Get Your First 1000 Likes How I Got 10K Real Followers in Referrals. This will show youhow much trafficyoure getting from individual networks:

This alone will tell you if your traffic is increasing over time or if you need to figure out why it isnt.In addition, you can often find out where that traffic is coming from by adding a secondary dimension of referral path. The referral path refers to the text that comes after the main domain.

On some networks, youll be able to see what post sent the traffic easily. On some, notably Twitter, you just get a jumbled up referral that isnt veryuseful. A plugin called Campalyst used to be able toconvert this data into the actual tweet, but it is no longer available.When you can, you want to look at the posts that sent the most traffic (that arent yours) and build relationships with whomever posted it. You havea good chance ofgetting significant recurring traffic.Finally, if you have a business plan on Buffer, you canintegrate Buffer statistics into GA.

ConclusionAfter reading all of that, do you really think you could just play around with social media and generate as much traffic as a serious business can?No way.A solid social media strategy is not for the light of heart. It will take you several hours to build your first plan.The next part is execution, which is even harder. You need to commit to following your strategy for months until you start seeing any real results, which still wont be that impressive.Trust me though, if you keep at it for a year or two, you will start seeing some great results. Right now, you are investing your time and resources so that you can get those results. Keep that in mind in the months ahead.Before you do that, tell me how getting traffic from social media is working for you right now. Leave me a comment below, and let me know how youll be revising or creating your social strategy.