Social Media and Affiliate Marketing

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Unless you have been living off grid and under a rock, you know that social media is running things around the world right now. 98%-99% of everyone on this planet has some form of social media or has been apart of social media in some way, shape, or form before in their lifetime. Whether it be from just chatting with random people you have met virtually, or from starting a whole career centered around social media. We have all encountered this amazing space on the internet before.

If you can remember, last year we began a whole blog series on Affiliate Marketing and began to give tips, trends, and our knowledge on the digital marketing field based on the expertise of our founder and owner, and also a certified digital marketer herself, Keara Douglas. For the new year of 2021, we are keeping the ball rolling on this topic with as much information we can give out for you all for free plus a little more in depth look into the Affiliate Marketing world with our very own e-course towards the beginning of Summer 2021 as well so stay tuned for that.

Today’s topic for the Delux Designs (DE), LLC Affiliate Marketing blog series is based on how social media ties into Affiliate Marketing. But before we begin let’s do a run down of the previous topics we have discussed already so far in our series this past 2020 year below. If you’ve missed any of the previous topics discussed or if this is your first time here at DE concerning Affiliate Marketing, click the links below to catch up. They go in order of our discussions so start with number one and work your way down to number 6. Don’t worry if you click on the links provided they will open in a new tab in your internet browser so you don’t lose this page.

Now that you’re all caught up, lets dig into our topic for today’s post of the series on Social Media and Affiliate Marketing.

As you have read above for the post on What is Affiliate Marketing, you now know that Affiliate Marketing is one of seven forms of Digital Marketing. It is primarily based online and has a focus of gaining online sales more than anything. Social media plays a huge role in gaining those sales by being a channel to gain traffic and build an audience. Remember in our Terminology post we defined a channel as being a medium for communication or passage of information and audience as being your subscribers to your blog, visitors to your website, or your followers on social media. Let’s define what exactly Social Media is to begin things off.

What is Social Media?
Social Media is websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. Social networking is the use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself.

As an affiliate marketer it is your primary goal to use the channels that are available to you in an effort to push and promote whatever product, merchandise or service you are assigned to build awareness around for your merchant, or affiliate manager. *Remember, your merchant or affiliate manager is who you would be working for as an affiliate, or publisher, whose products or services you would be promoting. Refer back to the Affiliate Terms for more information on these terms.* The first channel of choice for most merchants, is social media and the first choice of social media for most merchants is Instagram.

The top three choices of merchants for promotion of products, services, and events:

Instagram is the most popular for merchants to hire affiliate marketers on because of its ability to really showcase images and photos of products, services and events. When your audience is scrolling your Instagram feed they are mainly focused on the images more than the captions and brands love to use this to get those hot products out to the world for potential sales. You can really showcase your engagement with each product and really push for sales on this platform. When your audience sees that you enjoy something they’re more than likely to want what it is that is creating enjoyment for you. Facebook is a second preferred method because of the size of the audience on the platform. There is a huge range of people on the site from a wide age range. You are able to reach a lot of people at one time. Plus with Instagram and Facebook being in business together now, you can really cross promote products and services between them easily. Twitter is third because of the quick ability to not only post photos, but also info on the products and direct links to the products for traffic gains. This is where those EPCs can really rack up heavily with your tracking links. If you don’t know what a tracking link is, we have included more information on them in our Affiliate Terminology Printable with our affiliate partner Creative Market. Just click here to download it for your reference. Pinterest follows behind these top three but I believe it will become more popular over the next couple years if that with its growth so far right now. In the video world of social media Youtube would be number one for affiliate marketers who use video to promote products and events, TikTok would be second and Snapchat would be a popular third option.

Ways to Use Social Media as an Affiliate Marketer

Posting pictures, photos or images of the product or event you’re assigned to promote and bring awareness to.
Initiating conversations, reviews or polls centered around the product or event you’re assigned to.
Uploading videos of you using the products you’re assigned to or showing you participating at the events you’re promoting.
Promoting your website or blog post content about the products or events you’re assigned to.

As an affiliate marketer, social media is your greatest asset to have in order to promote and market right now. It is highly essential and important that you have a great standing in the social media world but that doesn’t mean that you need millions of followers, comments or even likes on your posts in order to be a great marketer for a merchant. You just need great engagement. We will touch on engagement in a seperate post later on for affiliate marketers so you’ll have a better understanding of it as well.

That’s all for today on Social Media and Affiliate Marketing.
Check out our next post in our Affiliate Marketing blog series on Visualization & Affiliate Marketing here. Also make sure you’re subscribed to our blog by clicking here so you don’t miss any of the other upcoming posts to come.

Disclaimer: Affiliate links have been included in this post in which Delux Designs (DE), LLC receives a commission from any sales made through this post. We assure you, the products featured through DE from product reviews are products that we recommend based off of our own personal experiences from using them. The information given in this post is from a Certified Digital Marketer. Results may vary.