How to use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing in 2023

• What’s your daily activity on social media? 
• When you scroll through Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, do you see product promotions or brand giveaways? 
• How often do you get promotional links in your social media feed?

Well, while reading these questions, you might already have mapped it with your daily experience of using social media. 

Social Media is no longer limited to sharing life events with friends and relatives that form a closed social circle. It has become a medium for exploring, expressing and experiencing. 

And this not only applies to individuals but is also true for business owners. 

Brands are crafting unparalleled experiences to showcase their products and services to the vast audience that is present on social media platforms. 

Now, if you are an affiliate marketer, be ready to earn unbelievable figures by resorting to social media for promotion.

It is a notion that affiliate marketing is no longer a safe passive earning option. With search engine algorithms changing every few days, it has sure become difficult to promote the links but with the right techniques, you can still make enough dough.

Affiliate marketing has a major share when it comes to customer acquisition and will witness an upward curve even in the near future. 

In this blog, I will share how you can use Social Media platforms for affiliate marketing to drive leads.

But before that, let me walk you through some statistics to support this statement;

• Around 45% of the world’s population is using social media 
• On average, people spend around 2 Hour and 22 Minutes on Social Media
• 81% of brands are using affiliate marketing for market penetration 

Now that you know the earning curve for affiliate marketing, let us move towards how leveraging social media can help you ace the affiliate marketing game.

Facebook

Almost everyone is on Facebook. This statement is not an exaggeration. You will find people aged from 13 to 65+ using Facebook on a daily basis. And don’t be surprised if you find dogs and cats accounts too! 
With over 2. 37 Billion monthly active users, Facebook is used enormously worldwide. It’s about time you optimize your affiliate marketing strategies to reach out to such a vast audience.

Create a Facebook Page

While you are doing affiliate marketing, posting the links on your personal profile might seem like spamming to your friends. Instead, create a Facebook page. 

With a page, you can easily create content and get a detailed analysis of your post-performance. But the catch is to create and share valuable content.

Apart from creating content consistently, it is also advisable to stay engaged with your audience. Be active through comments and direct messages with an intent to help and you will automatically reap the benefits of getting more page followers.

It is essential to decide a niche before you make a page to attract the right target audience. Because you don’t want your efforts to go askew. After finalizing your niche, you can start posting on your page with the affiliate links without sounding too promotional.

Create or join a Facebook Group

Groups have a higher engagement rate compared to pages. You can easily interact with the members of the group and provide useful information in your niche.

Once you have established your value among the group members, they will trust the products or services that you endorse. This, in turn, lends you a number of link clicks, and there it is – your affiliate marketing commission!

Facebook Ads

If you have a page where you are posting your affiliate marketing content, the key to growth is to reach more and more people who are the right audience.

This can be done with Facebook Ads. Facebook provides highly-targeted ad campaigns that can boost your post reach and get you the desired exposure.

Once you have a clear picture of who your target audience is, you can run the ad for the demographic, gender, age and behavior pattern that you are looking for in your audience.

Make sure that you are optimizing the links that you are sharing through this Facebook ads checklist. Affiliate Links are easily recognizable and they feel fishy. No one would click on links that don’t seem authentic.

A solution for this is to shorten the link using online link shortening tools and websites like;

• bitly
• tinyurl.com
• ow.ly
• buff.ly

Let’s move on to Instagram now.

Instagram

With over 1 Billion active monthly users and 500 million daily users, Instagram is among the favorite social media apps of the Millenials and Gen-Z. 
In terms of engagement, Instagram is just behind Facebook as 71% of the users are below 35. In 2018, SimilarWeb calculated the average time spent by people on Instagram and it accounted for 53 minutes every day.

Affiliate marketers can utilize the potential that Instagram has as a social media platform to share product links. But first, you have to be an influencer in your niche of products that you are endorsing. This will ensure that your followers trust you.

The key to getting more link clicks is having more Instagram followers who engage actively. Also, make sure that you have a Business Profile on Instagram to track your audience and post-performance.

Link in Bio

Unlike Facebook, you don’t get a direct link sharing option on Instagram. Instead, you have to post the affiliate link in your Bio. Every time you upload an affiliate marketing post, you have to update your Bio. Depending on your affiliate marketing strategy, you can choose between Linkin.bio and Linktree. Although both can help streamline link management on Instagram, Linkin.bio syncs with your post, while Linktree creates a multi-link landing page.

A relevant picture that’s appealing along with a detailed description of the product in the caption will suffice to inform your followers about the product. Tell your followers to click on the link in the bio to buy the product.

Instagram hashtags work magically when it comes to Reach. With the hashtags related to the products and brands that you are promoting, you can reach people who are not following you but might be interested in those products.

And if such prospects like the content that you are sharing, you have new followers!

Tools to sell directly through posts

Many tools in the market can be integrated with your Instagram account to enable redirection to the website of the product that you are affiliated with.

Link2Buy tool by Curalate comes in handy when it comes to making your images and videos clickable. This tool creates a link in your bio as soon as your followers click on the post. They are then redirected to the gallery for shopping.

Few other tools that you can explore are; 

• Shoppable Posts
• Shop Social 
• Postcart
• LikeToKnow.it

Instagram Stories

You can share your product affiliation link in Swipe up of your Instagram story. But this is possible only when you have more than 10,000 followers.

With product creatives and concise descriptions, you can link your story image to the product website. Stories are a brilliant way to liven up your Instagram feed and engage your followers, as well as earn new ones

If you don’t have 10,000 followers, you can use the link-shortening tools to optimize your affiliation link so that it can be easily remembered and typed.

Watching Instagram stories is a daily ritual of people and you get the right space to get your link out!

Instagram Post Promotions 

To reach the potential audience that has not discovered you yet, paid promotions on Instagram is an ideal way.

By selecting the demographic and interests that you want in your prospective followers, you can sponsor posts on Instagram. It is also preferable to export your Instagram analytics to understand the performance of your account in general.

Another way to increase your followers is by doing contests and giveaways to drive engagements. By offering discounts or gift coupons, you can attract followers and prompt them to share your posts or account through their stories.

That’s all about Instagram Affiliation Marketing. Let me take you to how it works on Twitter.

Twitter

Twitter has over 330 Million monthly active users, and 63% of this audience is aged between 35 to 65. With Instagram and Snapchat, you can cover the young generation, with Twitter, you can cover the more mature age group.

Being a microblogging platform, where you have to sum-up your message within 280 characters, you will have to be crisp and concise. You already have the data about the people that are using the platform; now, you need to observe how to create content.

When it comes to Twitter affiliate marketing, be smart and creative. Observing what your competitors are doing can help you in coming up with the right strategies and content to share and promote.

You can use Twitter Tools to manage your followers, tweets, and retweets, which, in turn, helps you in optimizing your profile. 

A few tools that you can use;

• Circleboom
• SocialPilot
• Commun.it
• Audiense
• Tweriod

Optimize your Twitter Bio

Summing up yourself within 160 characters is quite a task. But when it comes to writing a Bio on Twitter, you have only one option – Nailing it!

Your bio must be concise and represent who you are. It must be in line with your tweets and the rest of your Twitter interactions. Give it a voice, your voice.

It is not advisable to show that you are here to sell. But adding a link to your blog or website doesn’t hurt either. The key again is to keep it smart and subtle.

Interact genuinely to get discovered

Irrespective of the platform, interactions help you get noticed. Comment and retweet relevant content. Join Twitter chats to provide your opinions. 

This way, you will be adding value to your network’s feed. Also, you are contributing to the tweet threads related to your area of knowledge and interest. And before long, you might even turn out to be someone who is looked up to when it comes to your niche.

You can also connect with the influencers working in your niche. By building relationships with influencers, you are not only making way for getting endorsements, but you can be ready to get a lot of word-of-mouth marketing your way.

Create content consistently

It is not just competition that leads to creating content every day, but you have to keep yourself updated too. And that’s why you must tweet consistently.

While posting, make sure that you are doing it at the right time. Check out the best times to post on Twitter to drive maximum engagement.

If you want to batch content creation for all these platforms, you can use a tool like Venngage to make visual content quickly, all in one place.

Also, Twitter is a platform that gets you desirable results by employing hashtags. Use hashtags relevant to your content. Also, check the trending hashtags to see if it fits with what you are tweeting.

Using hashtag helps you to organize and sort your content. It helps those who are interested in your content but haven’t discovered you yet.

Twitter Ads and Analytics

Analytics is a boon for marketers. You can track the performance of your tweets and their popularity among your followers. This also helps in figuring out what your audience likes and dislikes from the engagement that you get on your tweets. 

When it comes to analytics, let me tell you another thing; keep your tweets visual too. With relevant pictures and videos, you can drive more engagement on your tweets. 

Coming to Twitter ads, you can explore the options available to run campaigns to boost affiliate marketing. 

Twitter Ads can be used to get new followers, to drive leads, or to promote your affiliate marketing offers. 

To gain followers:

You can run a campaign to gain new followers by promoting your tweets. In this, twitter shows your tweet to the target audience that you can define from the backend based on demographics and behavior. 

Once you have defined the campaign, generate a catchy message along with a CTA that leads to getting new followers. Keep this in mind, you are running this campaign to get new followers, not to sell the products. So the CTA and message must be aligned with this goal.

To engage with the audience:

You are putting your time, money, and effort to gain something, right? So getting conversions is after all the prime goal for promoting your tweets.

This type of Twitter campaign helps you in taking your followers to the next step, i.e., visiting your website. Employ a conversion tracking method to keep an eye on the actions performed by your visitors. This can be subscribing to your newsletter, product orders, or session time and frequency.

To perform advanced business tracking on Twitter, generate a Universal Website Tag and place it on your webpages to track the conversions.

Let me take you to the next platform where you can rock your affiliate marketing game.

Pinterest

Pinterest affiliate marketing is a bit different than the ones that I listed above. Here, it is all about creating boards and pinning. 

When you are new to the platform, the first step is to create boards. These boards must be in the same niche as the products that you are endorsing. For eg., if you are doing affiliate marketing in kitchen products or home decor, create boards relevant to it.

Create around eight to ten such boards with different products. A few examples are;

• Healthcare Tips
• Book Recommendation 
• Home Decor
• Travel Destinations
• Pets, etc.

Add a description to each board. And in the end, add a link to your affiliated products relevant to the board. 

After creating boards, add pins to these boards. 

It is tasking to add pins, and that’s why I recommend using a tool that can help you in adding pins readily. Below I have listed a few tools that can be handy to handle your Pinterest account;

• Buffer
• Tailwind
• ViralWoot
• Pinvolve
• Loop88

Optimize your Pinterest Account;

Once you have created boards and added pins to them, you can focus on gaining followers who would be interested in your pinned content. 

With the tools mentioned above, you can schedule pins in your boards weekly. Optimize the time when you can get the maximum engagement to schedule posts. This engagement can be in the form of repins, website clicks, or product orders. Social media scheduling also makes it easier to manage multiple social accounts

Also, make sure to repin the content shared by influencers to get discovered on Pinterest. You can join group boards, and this way, you get exposure to a lot of content out there. 

Unlike other social media platforms, you will hardly need to resort to Pinterest Ads. Instead, you can invest in the tools that can automate your Pinterest interactions to gain traction on your account. 

The last in line is Snapchat, but it is an exciting and novel way to promote your affiliate marketing. Let’s dive into it quickly. 

Snapchat

Snapchat is quite a new player in the market when it comes to social media. But beware, it’s not weak. You might think how this fleeting photo and video sharing platform be of any use to you as an affiliate marketer?

But there, you might be in the dark. Let me clear the air for you and tell you how Snapchat can be used to connect with people aged 18-24 who are the prime users of the platform.

It’s a little tricky to get noticed on Snapchat, but with the right baby steps, you can get there. There’s no hashtag or reposts here. So the only option is to follow the users, interact with them through snaps to get follow-backs.

How can Snapchat help you in affiliate marketing?

• Share teasers of product launch to generate curiosity to pique the interest of your audience. 
• Provide offers that can entice the attention of your followers. As the photos and videos are only visible for 24 hours, make the most of this window.
• Provide content access to a specific group that’s loyal to you. Offer them reward points for purchases or exclusive discounts to make them feel special.
• Use the Snapchat Live feature to engage with your followers while you are visiting trade fairs or product launch events and the like. 
• Engage with your followers by hosting contests and giveaways. 

You can always keep the doors open for experiments. With the trial and error strategy at hand, you will get to know what works best for you on Snapchat with the audience at hand here. 

Wrapping up

With the increasing competition and changing algorithms of the search engines and social media platforms, it is difficult to reach your affiliate marketing goals. But nothing is impossible. 

With a cocktail of the right strategies, customer service tools, platforms, and content, you can be game when it comes to selling to your prospects. I hope that the insights mentioned above might prove to help increase your affiliate marketing conversions. 

Have Happy Selling!

Dhruv Maheshwari