While traditional affiliate channels like blogs, websites and email marketing can still be very effective, affiliates who have not yet added social media channels to their mix should seriously consider doing so. Not only will this allow you to reach new, highly relevant customers as well as influencers and creators, but most platforms also provide affiliates with the tools they need to create content and seamlessly share referral links to their built-in audience of followers. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Choosing which social media platform really depends on your social media objectives; for example are you aiming to build your brand or looking for lead generation?  Either way, you need to consider which channels are used by your target audience, the channels that your competitors are using, and the type of content that is most likely to engage with your audience.

1. Facebook – Facebook is by far the biggest channel for posting affiliate marketing links as they now reach around a third of the world’s population. Most businesses consider it as the second website for their products these days. Since their market penetration is so large, you can target almost every age group on Facebook. Start by setting up a business FB page from which you can share your affiliate links. And be sure to keep content fresh, highly relevant and original. Also don’t forget to regularly analyze your stats so you can easily decide your future strategies.

2. Youtube – The video-sharing site now has around 2 billion users so competition for eyeballs is quite stiff, however there are no limits to the niches in which you can create video content for. As with other social media channels you can monetize your video content as part of your affiliate marketing campaigns by creating videos and placing affiliate links in the video and the video descriptions. Affiliates can also place a small image overlay on the video with the tracking link. Affiliate marketers can use tracking to redirect the user to the affiliate website or affiliate landing page, where the user will make the purchase and generate the commission.

3. Twitter – Although not as popular as Facebook, Twitter has incredible engagement rates that could benefit your business. Using Twitter for affiliate marketing will help you to increase your brand awareness and most importantly, to start building your own audience of loyal followers. Once you have signed up to Twitter, make sure that you have a good profile for your future visitors to get an idea of who you are, including a short description of you, hobbies, interests, and the URL of your website as well. You can get followers by following users in your niche first, post engaging posts with useful advice to your followers, and retweet advice from trusted users. It’s also very important to get the timing of your Tweets right. B2B posts do well on weekdays whereas, for B2C companies, weekends are the most engaged.

4. Instagram – Insta has grown into a great platform for affiliate marketing since it gives you the chance to monetize your audience easily. Instagrammers can promote a merchant’s products by placing a discrete affiliate link in published content. You can also promote your affiliate offers by just writing it on the images as a text overlay and use a tool to shorten the long tracking URL, for example, Bit.ly. Instagram affiliates can also use coupons instead of tracking links and display the coupon as a text overlay on images to enable affiliate tracking.

There are of course several other social channels like Tiktok, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Telegram etc. but as a beginner it is best to start with a few and build it up from there. Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any assistance.

Good luck!

The Publisher Management Team