By The main premise of affiliate marketing is that an affiliate will have their own website or blog and they will promote the products of their partner merchants by making specific content. The merchant will rely on the audience of the affiliate to click on the links that will lead them to their own product page.
Once a person buys something using that affiliate link, the affiliate will then be given a percentage commission based on the sale that was made. That is affiliate marketing in a nutshell.
Aside from creating content and placing them on the affiliate’s website, affiliate marketers can harness the power of social media to their advantage.
In this article, I will be talking about the things that you should know about social media as it relates to affiliate marketing.
Choose Your Preferred Social Media Platform
There are so many different social media sites out there, but affiliate marketers can just focus on three major players: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Do note that Instagram was bought by Facebook a couple of years back, but it still operates as its own standalone platform.
So, which platform should you choose?
Facebook is arguably the best social media platform on the internet today. With over 1.5 billion users and at least 800 million active users daily, it is without a doubt that this is the social media behemoth that affiliate marketers can use to their advantage.
Your potential customers are most likely using Facebook more than any other platform out there and the site keeps on making timely improvements to make everyone’s experience so much better.
If you are going to leverage Facebook as part of your campaign, create a business page highlighting your website or blog.
You can promote your content here, but make sure that you do not come off as a pure salesman. If anything, just settle with a business entity that doesn’t employ ‘in your face’ tactics.
Instagram enjoys 900 million active users monthly and it is another popular social media platform for sure. Even though the company was bought by Facebook a few years back, it still operates as a standalone platform.
That being said, it is a bit harder to do some affiliate marketing gigs on Instagram, mainly because there are no link sharing features right off the bat. The feature can only be unlocked until you have more than 1000 followers, so until then, you can only post your affiliate links in your own profile page.
Twitter is quite unique in the sense that it is not social media in the traditional sense like what you see on Instagram and Facebook.
Instead of posting pictures and creating timely posts, you send out tweets or share retweets in order to gain a massive following.
If you want to be successful in using Twitter, you have to make sure that you are sending at least 5-10 tweets a day, given that there could potentially be 350,000 tweets per minute.
Do not worry as there are automation tools that you can use to send timely tweets based on certain parameters.