Affiliates

How to Leverage Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

Social media offers a lot of capabilities for affiliate marketers, and leveraging platforms effectively can help to optimize your success. Understanding each social network’s audiences, features, and messaging capabilities is essential to make the most of your online presence. The following is an overview of critical strategies, insights and tips to help you successfully integrate social media into your business.

Save the Pitches for Your Site

People follow your business and engage with your content on social media because they find it interesting, entertaining or valuable. Your social channels aren’t the place to simply pitch your affiliate products. Instead, save the strong promotions for your landing pages and blog posts.

Use your social posts to attract interest from people in your target market based on the value they derive from your content and conversation. Think about the topics of interest to your targeted social user and build message campaigns around them. The occasional glowing endorsement of a highly-preferred product is fine—just don’t overdo it.

When you do include an affiliate link, remember to create a redirect that makes it less obvious that you are selling a product. Some social networks automatically create condensed URLs for embedded links. You can also use your hosting network’s resources.

Integrate Photos and Videos

In the hyper-cluttered environment that is a social media timeline, you must have images or videos to garner attention. People scan their feeds instantaneously, and powerful visualization is more likely to earn attention than a text-only post.

Along with images of products, include images depicting people enjoying lifestyles and activities inspired by the products you sell. Embed short videos that illustrate the benefits of a product, such as the ease of use, performance and versatility.

Post Consistently

Only a tiny portion of your followers sees a post the first time it is published. Therefore, it is important to re-post popular items to reach more people. Additionally, a lack of regular posting leads to unfollowers. People want to follow interesting and active accounts.

Blend planned campaign posts with engagement. Schedule your branded and content posts at least one week ahead. Use scheduler tools to pre-post and then dictate the publishing time. Schedule time each day to check “mentions” of your account so you can respond quickly. Make some time to also interact with people sharing other topics related to your business.

Include Proper Disclosures

The Federal Trade Commission has aggressively targeted lack of proper disclosure on social media posts containing promoted content. To operate ethically and to abide by FTC requirements, include disclosures on any social media posts containing product promotions and affiliate links. A simple “#Ad” or “#Promoted” will do.

Conclusion

These are some of the best ways that affiliate marketers can leverage social media to build their brands. Once you successfully drive traffic to your website, you need an effective solution to facilitate online payment process. That’s where the Payoneer Global Payment service comes into play. You can secure payments from global clients, efficiently, safely and affordably!

Neil Kokemuller

Neil Kokemuller has been a college marketing professor since 2004. He has also been an active business, marketing and education writer and content media website developer since 2007. Kokemuller has additional professional experience in retail and small business, and holds a Master of Business Administration from Iowa State University.