The phenomenal growth of social media and online platforms in the last few years has made affiliate marketing a massive success. Affiliate marketing is an exciting business model that primarily involves promoting other people’s products or services and earning a certain commission on each sale.
While traditional marketing methods are still relevant, social media platforms have become increasingly important for affiliate managers to market products and earn money for brands and themselves.
Data also suggests that affiliate marketing channels generate anywhere between 5% and 25% of the total online sales for some of the world’s biggest brands. Apart from helping you earn a decent commission(s) as an affiliate manager by successfully selling their products to the target audience, the channel also allows brands to generate more revenue/sales by simply paying a percentage of sales to the approved affiliate manager.
In this article, we’ll explore more about the channel, how affiliate managers leverage social media for their affiliate marketing success.
Why Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing?
Social media today offers endless and exciting capabilities for affiliate managers, and leveraging different social platforms effectively can be a great way to optimize your success.
Right from recommending products in blog posts to sharing referral links to coupon codes from various influencer promos, affiliate marketing makes it super easy to promote your business online, especially on social media platforms. The biggest advantage is that social media is free and user-friendly, making it one of the preferred channels for most affiliate managers to leverage.
However, the need here is to understand every platform thoroughly, along with other aspects, such as each social network’s audiences, features, and messaging capabilities, to make the most of your online presence.
If approached well, social media platforms offer affiliate managers various resources and appropriate tools they need to create content and effortlessly share referral links with their followers.
How Can Affiliate Managers Leverage Social Media?
In this section, we will discuss some key strategies, top insights, and other tips to help you successfully leverage social media for your affiliate marketing business.
Let’s dive in.
1. Pick the Right Social Media Channel
Since not all social media platforms are created equal, choosing the right platforms for your audience and niche is important to maximize your affiliate marketing efforts.
The idea here is to leverage social media platforms and posts to attract interest from users in your specific target market based on the value they can get from your content and conversation. You can think of specific areas and topics of interest to your target audiences/users and build message campaigns around them on the right platform.
For instance, if your target audience is young adults, using platforms like Instagram and TikTok is best. Likewise, LinkedIn might be a great fit if your target is business professionals.
2. Thoroughly Analyze the Platform’s Features
Once you are clear about the platform to promote your products on, look at the characteristics of each social platform and find out how they can be used to promote your affiliate links.
For instance, Instagram’s swipe-up feature is a great way to drive traffic to your affiliate link. Additionally, you should work towards establishing yourself as an authority in your specific niche by building a strong personal brand. You can do this by sharing valuable content, showing your expertise in specific areas, or engaging with your audience.
Another important thing to do here is research competition and see the platforms they leverage. This can, in turn, help you determine the social media platforms that are most effective in your specific niche.
3. Consider Your Content Strategy
To succeed as an affiliate manager, you must also determine which social media platform aligns best with your unique content strategy. Largely, social media services offers brands several different content formats to test and see what works best.
For instance, short-form video content is very popular today and can help you engage with the audience and convert more customers. This is because video content is an excellent way to bring a product to life and is especially helpful for how-to videos.
Likewise, if you wish to create long-form videos, Linkedin or YouTube may be the best platforms. Meanwhile, Instagram and Pinterest may be the best fit to create product descriptions for promoting fashion or beauty products as they’re visually-driven platforms.
4. Community Marketing
Community marketing is a great way to help businesses and brands connect to a niche or specialized market segment. In this form of marketing, affiliate managers interact, engage, and exchange values with this community on specific topics related to their niche. For instance, affiliate managers who only talk about and promote curly hair and how to deal with it can create a powerful interactive shopping experience.
Various social networks such as Facebook, allow you to create specific groups for community marketing. Being a community affiliate manager is a targeted way to concentrate on your affiliate marketing efforts.
All you need to do for community marketing as an affiliate manager is build a community profile to influence them. As a community affiliate manager, you must also be very particular about the products in your specific market, as your credibility depends on the brands you associate with yourself.
5. Build Connections with Other Affiliate Managers
Connecting with other affiliates is another excellent way to leverage social media as an affiliate manager, as it can help you support each other and increase your followers. All you have to do here is share links and products on the relevant social media platforms to start appreciating and contributing to each other’s online success. Another effective way to build and solidify these connections is through virtual collaborations. Hosting virtual meet-ups or brainstorming sessions on platforms like Zoom can foster a deeper connection. And when you’re sharing invaluable insights or strategies during these sessions, always record on Zoom. This allows for an archive of the conversation that can be shared with those who couldn’t participate live or be revisited for future reference.
Another advantage of building connections with other affiliate managers is healthy competition that ultimately helps you improve how you use social media for affiliate marketing. Additionally, networking and cooperation also allow you to learn from your peers and improve your marketing skills.
The platforms you can use here include Instagram and Facebook, which allow users to livestream to their audience and give you a range of other benefits. For instance, when live streaming with another influencer, you get access to the combined follower list of both parties, which significantly increases your reach.
6. Post Consistently
Regardless of which platform you are using, fewer followers see a post the very first time it is published. This makes it important to post content regularly to be able to reach more people.
Apart from this, continuity of content is also important to keep followers’ interest, as most customers want to follow active, engaging, and interesting accounts.
A few things you need to keep in mind here include:
- Schedule your branded and content posts at least one week ahead.
- Ensure to blend all your planned campaign posts with engagement.
- It is recommended to use scheduler tools to pre-post, followed by dictating the publishing time.
- It is best to schedule time daily to check “mentions” of your social media account so you can respond quickly.
The idea here is to leverage social media for building relationships. The best way to do this is by promptly responding to their messages, comments, and inquiries. Likewise, initiate conversations with your target audience whenever possible, ask relevant questions, and encourage meaningful discussions to foster a sense of community.
7. Focus on Good Affiliate Products
When using social media for affiliate marketing, referring and promoting high-quality products is very important, especially if you wish to see the desired results.
This is because promoting sub-standard products will just disengage your audience at the very beginning, regardless of how good your affiliate links are, how professional your posts are, or how often you use videos and photos.
To get faster and sure-shot results, promoting something you have already tried or invested in is recommended. This will not only impress your audience with your offering but also ensure that they’ll spread the word of mouth and help you bring in more customers.
Overall, it is important to remember that supporting or prompting a small number of goods you truly believe in is way better than just promoting as many as possible. The strategy will help you significantly maximize your affiliate marketing efforts on social media.
8. Create Short URLs for Affiliate Products
Affiliate managers should always use link-shortening services and simplify their work to get the maximum out of social media platforms. This is primarily because the original links to affiliate offers are generally long and may look like spam.
Therefore, it is important to always post shortened URLs online, especially if you don’t want the URL structure and length to impact your affiliate sales negatively.
Regardless of the platform you use, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other social platform, make sure you attach relevant short links with your content that look professional and neat. There are several link-shortening services available online that you can use here.
9. Make Use of Social Media Tools
Affiliate marketing can quickly become challenging if you don’t use the appropriate tools and resources to achieve the best results. For instance, social media tools like Awesome Social are available to help you develop interesting content ideas for your social media profiles.
Likewise, you can leverage tools to help capture emails of people interested in offers you are promoting. The market offers several such online social media tools to help you successfully navigate your affiliate marketing issues and improve sales indirectly.
The Bottomline
With global interest in affiliate marketing rising over 300% between 2017 and 2021, even a social media beginner can become an expert at leveraging social media for affiliate marketing by following the above tips, guidelines, and methods.
Social media platforms offer multiple opportunities for affiliate managers to generate sales for brands they work with, build a loyal audience, and subsequently earn from it.
Whether you’ve just begun your journey as an affiliate manager or are struggling to move ahead with stagnant affiliate sales, the methods mentioned above and strategies can help you bring noticeable results within a short period of time.