Social media are the biggest platforms for anything online related. If you want to promote, sell, or buy anything online, social media is your friend. For affiliate marketers, social media can also be a lucrative and great business opportunity. Affiliate programs are gaining in popularity and most of them can help you grow bigger and earn more money. You can also choose to promote your website, blog, or whatever. So in reality, wherever you are trying to do, social media is a great place to start!
What is it?
Affiliate marketing and social media go hand in hand. Affiliates love using social networks to promote their offers and make money easily with them. If you aren’t quite sure what affiliate marketing is, here is a quick explanation. Affiliate marketing is a type of partnership between an affiliate marketer and a company. The marketer promotes products and services from the company and gets a commission for it.
It’s important to note that if you promote these offers from your social media accounts, these posts need to have some value. If you create throwaway posts all the time, people will start ignoring your posts. Your engagement will be low and your profits will be small.
This is the reason why most affiliates use the 80-20 rule. 80% of the content should be useful, informative, and interesting. 20% of the content should be promotions. You can use this 80-20 within each post, or within all of your posts.
Choosing the right Social Network
Social media should be approached like any other marketing effort. You need to evaluate which approach is the right one for you on a case-by-case basis. Many chose the platform that has the most users, but this doesn’t have to be the best approach.
You need to research what platform best suits each of your marketing campaigns. Some smaller social media platforms might be much more lucrative if they have more of your target audience than the bigger, broader ones.
So first, let’s start by picking the right platform for you!
1. Facebook
Facebook is a social media juggernaut. Facebook has by far the most users of any network. By some estimates, it’s over 2 billion users worldwide. Also, it has the most diverse user base, encompassing almost every demographic.
Photos, video, text, and links are among the ad formats supported by Facebook. Users can share this content in a variety of ways. This platform is ideal for affiliate marketing since it allows you to quickly share affiliate links with broad audiences.
Positives:
- B2B, B2C marketing
- Huge audience
- Easy sharing of marketing material
- Great for niche audiences
2. Instagram
Instagram is owned by the above-mentioned Facebook. They are currently one of the leading platforms for young people. They boasted in 2019 that they have over 1 billion active users. So the app is enormous for sure!
The app has changed how people view and interact with brands by using photos (and some videos) for social sharing. Branding has become an Instagram aesthetic for users, and a product picture has become a direct connection to make a purchase.
This network combines affiliate marketing and influencer marketing to increase brand awareness. However, exchanging referral links is restricted on the website.
Positives:
- B2C marketing
- Younger audience
3. YouTube
With over 2 billion users, the video-sharing site has a vibrant and engaged audience, with most of its users watching videos at least once a week.
This site, which is based on video streaming, is an excellent way to reach out to consumers. So much so that 90% of people say product videos are helpful in the purchasing process. 64% say they are more likely to purchase a product online after seeing one.
It's a good opportunity to collaborate with video makers, also known as YouTubers. They can create video content around your product for affiliate marketing.
Positives:
- B2B and B2C marketing
- Users across all age groups
- Worldwide audience
4. Twitter
This platform is all about being as up-to-date as possible. Twitter manages to bring brands closer to the masses and make them feel less like a faceless company. The platform has over 300 million users worldwide, making it one of the top 10 visited websites in the US.
On Twitter, affiliate marketing assists marketers in promoting goods and engaging with viewers. Besides, the platform allows users to share referral links in their Tweets.
Positives:
- B2B, B2C marketing
- B2C customer engagement
- Users of all age groups
- Potential to go viral
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn has grown into an influential promotional channel for companies. Having started as a platform for job searching and professional networking. LinkedIn is used by one out of every four social media users and has a high interaction score.
This platform is perfect for affiliate marketers promoting B2B goods or services. Particularly because users are often the ones who make purchase decisions for businesses.
Positives:
- B2B Marketing
- Focused on educated and working professionals
- High engagement rate
6. Pinterest
Pinterest has 250 million active users. It caters to a wide range of interests, including fashion and beauty, health and wellbeing, and home and garden.
Pinterest is closely related to e-commerce, with 61% of users claiming to have bought something after seeing it on the web. Pinterest users are more likely to make a purchase than users on other sites because of this.
Positives:
- B2C marketing
- Image sharing, referral link sharing
- High engagements rate
Now that you have an idea of how social networks perform. Pick one or a few you want to focus on. Picking the right social media isn’t enough. You also need to know how to utilize their features and better advertise with them. So here are the best methods you should use for social media affiliate marketing!
What you should do on social media
The following are a few tried and true strategies for affiliate marketing success on social media!
1. Do Research
Before starting you need to know a lot about your audience and the product you are trying to advertise. This is where research is vital!
B2C is simple. It’s a customer deciding whether or not to buy something. B2B is a bit more complicated as it involves more steps. Image-centric platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, for example, are perfect for B2C sales. They are particularly good for e-commerce. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are best suited for sharing. In-depth posts and blogs, as well as reaching out to industry-specific audiences, for B2B.
You also need to know your audience. The more specific your audience targeting is the more successful your campaigns will be.
Consider who the target audience is and where they spend the most time on social media. The following are some primary demographics:
- Age
- Location
- Gender (depending on industry)
- Income & spending habits
Most social media platforms make targeting these demographics easy and simple. So use them whenever you can!
2. Use Good Affiliate Products
Imagine this, you have a great affiliate marketing campaign on social media platforms. Everything is perfect. Your posts are well written, your images are eye-catching and interesting, and you post regularly to your audience. Seems perfect right? Well, there is a catch. Nobody wants to buy anything from you. Why? Because you are or you have sold bad products.
If you advertise bad products people that buy them will blame you. They will feel cheated and they will show their unhappiness straight away. You will get bad reviews, comments, and terrible word of mouth. A really bad product can ruin your whole image in the eye of the buyers. So be aware. Always try researching the products and only sell and advertise those that are worth doing so! Don’t ruin your whole business because of a quick buck!
3. Redirect Link
Affiliate links often look sketchy and are pretty easy to spot. A great way to circumvent this is to create a clean and simple redirect link that you can place inside of your social media posts. Just double-check if the social media platform has a policy against that!
4. High-Quality Content
Having engaging content is very important in social media marketing. Your content needs to be interesting enough to attract your audience. You need attention-grabbing copy that will draw your audience to read through your post and click on the link. Your content needs to be able to stand on its own.
5. Effective Photos
A picture is worth a thousand words. We all heard of this phrase and it’s true. If your ad/post images or videos are great and interesting, you will see an incredible uptick in clicks. Your photos should go along with your social media affiliate posts and work together with the copy. The images should be used to draw attention to the copy, and then copy to the link/product. It’s as simple as that!
Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest are especially in need of great images as they are image/video-based. Create epic photos and enjoy the boost your affiliate marketing campaigns will get.
6. Partnering With Other Affiliates
There are a lot of affiliate marketers out there. Connecting with them can give you great partnerships that can help your business quite a lot. And guess where it’s the easiest to start these partnerships, on social media!
When teaming up with other affiliates you can share links, posts, and help each other out as a team would. You can work together and cross-promote your products so that your audiences slowly merge. Not everyone is a competitor, most people can be great partners if you allow them to do so!
7. Staying Active
If you want to get a following or want to keep an existing one, you need to stay active. Inactivity can kill even the biggest communities as people simply forget about you and what you are offering. Try posting at least a few times a week, or if you are serious about things, daily.
If you stay active, your audience won’t forget about you and your following will slowly increase. With that increase, you can reach a broader audience and earn more revenue. As simple as that! Use the algorithms each social media network constructed to gain an advantage over your competition.
Final Words
Social media is one of the most powerful tools in an affiliate’s toolset. If you are smart and consistent you can gain an incredible audience that engages with your brand. Using some of the tips found in this article you can step up your game and dominate the competition. Or even better, partner with people and dominate the competition even more! There are a lot of benefits you can gain from social media networks, so try to get them all!
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