Social Media and Affiliates

DMCM1112 - Are Affiliate Marketers Maximising on Social Media?

The big question is whether Affiliates are using social media to maximise their earning potential. There are certainly a number of reasons why they should however, are traditional affiliate marketing techniques still more effective? Social media is a fantastic way to communicate to your potential 'customers' and therefore it must be an effective way to drive traffic to a website and make an affiliate sale. There are now many social media channels that have become very popular, especially within the DMCM1112 group. One of the oldest and still the best forms of social media is the 'blog', although Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly popular. Below are a few ideas that could be used for Affiliate marketers for some of the more popular social media channels.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn opens up a world of opportunities for your company or you personally. If you expand your network and connect with people in the same industry it can be a great way to share your experiences. Creating a buzz about your product can be a daunting task, but by using LinkedIn, the proffsssional networks that are interesting in your particular industry are more likely to listen and click on our links. There are over 100 million LinkedIn users and what better way to network then with people who are like minded. The DMCM1112 class all have LinkedIn profiles to expand their networks. Adding inspirational articles to LInkedIn will certainly get you noticed and clicks on your affiliate links.

YouTube

Most of us have used YouTube to view are favourite sporting moments or the hit song of the week. However, YouTube is a great was for customers to visually view your products and provides brand personality to your brand. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet and is a powerful leaver for driving traffic to your site. If your video catches the imagination of your audience, who knows what amounts of traffic it could lead to. The DMCM1112 class will be using YouTube to make walk through movies which will be posted on these blogs. If an affiliate managed to create a popular channel through the power of YouTube, the lead generation is bound to make you sales and increase you affiliate conversion rate. Best of all it is free to upload your videos to YouTube and you can even make money by allowing adverts on your videos.

Twitter

Great for having a good old moan at your utility providers, stalking celebrities or keeping in touch with the rest of the world, Twitter is now dominating our lives. It's not only a way of instantly getting your message out there, but it also provides a great platform for 2-way communication, firstly with your merchants; watching what they are promoting and keeping in touch or sourcing new ones.

Secondly, your readers and site users will have their own thoughts and experiences they want to share, they might have questions about products or more importantly they might become 'brand advocates'. Re-tweeting and sharing your messages to their followers, they will help to promote you and your site.

Twitter now has over 100m active users on their platform and is generating more buzz than Facebook for the first time. Keeping up with celebrities and generally staying in touch with the world is what many people use Twitter for. However, it is a way of instantly getting your messages out there like the DMCM1112 groups and is a fantastic platform for two way communication. An affiliate can keep up with the merchants to see what the best offers are to promote and they can also tweet out these promotions themselves to drive traffic and make an affiliate sale. Secondly, readers of the tweets are more than likely to have their own thoughts and experiences on Twitter so they may share or 're-tweet' the content. Twitter is a great way to quickly get out your offers and generate some sort of awareness using hashtags and key phrases