How to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

Digistore24 has put together an easily-digestible guide on how to use social media for affiliate marketing, so affiliates like you can have convenient access to key information if you want to get started right away on your affiliate journey.

How to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the type of business that anyone can get into fairly quickly and easily, even with having little to no experience in this industry. And now more than ever, social media has made it even easier to get started and tap into audiences across the entire planet almost effortlessly. You no longer need to run an elaborate plan as an affiliate... You can now make money with affiliate marketing without a website easily and become successful by using social media, email and ads. All you need to do is browse a few affiliate networks, pick one that fits your needs, choose some of the best affiliate marketing products, and proceed to using social media.

To achieve success, you need to leverage the power of social media and use every platform available to promote offers, attract loyal customers, provide quality content, as well as engage with your followers in creative ways. From giveaways to contests, live streams and takeovers, possibilities of forming authentic connections with your target audience are limitless. And by being both free and user-friendly, many social media platforms have become the go-to for affiliate marketers when starting out.

However, you should also learn affiliate marketing basics to have a solid grasp of the industry.

Get Started with Using Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

According to a Statista report published at the beginning of 2022, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide back in 2020, and this number is projected to increase to almost 4.4 billion by 2025. Basically, these numbers speak for themselves. And we’re guessing you're interested in tapping into this large pool of users, but don’t actually know where to start.

Luckily, we put together an easily-digestible & actionable guide on how to use social media for affiliate marketing.

How NOT to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

Before we go into more details, let’s put some misconceptions to rest about social media. Regardless of what you might have previously heard, promoting offers on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok isn’t just mindlessly spamming your followers with affiliate links.

No matter what social media platform you’re using, you need to create a solid strategy before even considering posting anything. You might be familiar with some channels, and even use some in your day-to-day activities, however, running a business account is totally different than just simply having a personal account.

So, to avoid making unnecessary mistakes and proceeding to post without having a proper strategy, review the upcoming key steps in this article and learn how to build a successful affiliate marketing plan through social media.

The Best Ways to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing

The first thing you need in order to get started is to pick your social media channel(s).

But before that, make sure you already picked a niche, an affiliate network with a good marketplace, like the Digistore24 Marketplace, and most importantly, that you’re somewhat familiar with how affiliate marketing works. 

Being part of a great affiliate program is a good starting point - all you need to do now is learn how to properly place your affiliate link across different social media platforms. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

1. Choose Your Social Media Platform(s) Carefully

Thankfully, there are a variety of options to choose from, so let’s go over a few and see which are the best social media channels for affiliate marketers. Picking the right social media platform when you’re just starting out can make a world of difference.

Facebook

Arguably one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet, Facebook is a great space for promoting offers. Jumping on Facebook is pretty straightforward, and chances are, you already have an account, and if not, you can easily create one here. Even if you do have an account, we recommend sometimes creating a new one for your brand.

Affiliate marketers can create a business account or a personal account. With a personal account, you can build a “Friends” list and add people who you think could be interested in the content you’re creating and offers you’re promoting. Affiliates can also join groups and add value to the community with social media posts, while selectively including an affiliate link here and there when a certain level of trust has been established.

You can also create content with a business account, but you’ll have to create an ad budget for running ads because reaching people organically will be difficult. You can choose to run different types of ads and get creative with videos or stories by using the Meta Business Suite.

Either way, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users, you can pretty much tap into any audience in the world, and target any age group, location or interests on Facebook.

Instagram

Instagram has a huge potential for promoting affiliate offers - the platform has over 1 billion users! The best thing about Instagram is that the platform’s algorithm can work in your favor, especially if your content is on point. Instagram is super accurate in showing users exactly what they want to see, however, Instagram is highly competitive, so you need to stand out with your content.

Build a solid profile, post valuable content consistently, and make sure everything is visually pleasing and stands out. Engage with your target audience through Stories or live streams, and strive to build a loyal following. You can also run ads on Instagram through the Meta Business Suite, so both organic and paid advertising options should be considered.

If you want to tap into the Millenial and Gen-Z audience, Instagram is the place to be.

TikTok

TikTok is (almost) all about the Gen-Zers. You can still find other generations on the platform, however, young people are predominant. That’s why your marketing efforts here should be extra polished. TikTok is a great place to promote affiliate offers and attract new customers. The channel gives you the opportunity to create short videos that have the potential to reach thousands of users, without you even having an immense following.

If your content is well-done, relevant and helpful, the algorithm will work in your favor. If you’re creative and like making short, fun and easily digestible videos, you should definitely give TikTok a try.

Pinterest

We actually talked about how Pinterest is a unique social media platform for affiliates in one of our previous articles: The Best Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing. This hybrid space that is half social media, half search engine used mostly for inspiration. As an affiliate, all you need to do is create a few Boards, populate them with Pins and link the photos to one of your landing pages.

The audience on Pinterest is predominantly women of all ages and young men.

Reddit

Another hybrid platform is Reddit. Reddit is considered a social media platform but acts like a forum. If you want to create a social media strategy on Reddit, you need to become part of the online communities, aka subreddits. Start off by providing engaging content, answering questions, and then slowly start marketing offers.

The audience on Reddit is super diverse. You can find pretty much every age group scattered across multiple subreddits.

Twitter

Having a Twitter account and posting affiliate links sounds super easy, but unfortunately, it isn’t. Same thing applies here too as with the rest of the platforms: to have success, you first need to build a respectable Twitter account, provide value, and only then start trying to sell affiliate products to your audience.

2. Create High-Quality Content

We briefly mentioned a few tips and tricks about content in the previous section, however, we cannot stress this enough… Creating engaging content is one of the key elements of having success with affiliate marketing on social media. Build your content around your preferred niche, and always try to seamlessly integrate your informative content with your marketing.

Each social media platform comes with its own characteristics, so investing time to learn how these online environments work can definitely pay off both in the short and long term. Whether you’re posting photos, long-form affiliate marketing posts, short copy or review videos, ensure everything is skillfully crafted and entices your target audience to interact with you and your brand.

3. Take Time to Really Know Your Target Audience

Each platform has a diverse pool of members, ranging from Gen-Zers to Millennials and even Baby Boomers.

Let’s say, for example, you're promoting personal development offers. These types of offers do well with younger traffic that can be found on TikTok and Instagram. If you’re looking to promote survival offers, for instance, your best bet is going on Facebook and targeting the older generations.

Furthermore, get in touch with macro or micro influencers who promote affiliate offers on a daily basis and get some tips on how to connect with your target audience better. They might even give you tips on how to work with a referral link. And who knows… If you build up a large enough following, you can also take the influencer route.

4. Get Good at Working with Ads

To have success with your affiliate marketing campaigns, you might need to get good at working with ads. When creating ads, the key demographics you should focus on are location, gender, age and interests. The trick is to accurately identify the people that might be interested in what you’re promoting, and successfully target them with strategically placed ads.

Social media ads can show up in a person’s feed, stories, and more. Whichever space you choose to run ads in, make sure the creative fits in seamlessly. Furthermore, remember to always keep an eye on performance, and tweak your ads accordingly. When you’re first starting out, you’ll be spending a great chunk of your time just testing different approaches with ads, so be patient and don’t give in. 

Effective affiliate marketing ad campaigns don’t just happen overnight, but check out a few pointers that could speed up the process:

5. Always Be Optimizing…

Lastly, pay attention to how your content performs across every social media channel. 

Overall, try to be engaging but don’t overdo things: ideally, create a social media calendar and stick to it. Consistency is key, and posting regularly should be a priority. With organic social media posts, you have to create a certain rhythm with your content and avoid being chaotic. 

Additionally, remember to mention offers you’re promoting regularly, but don’t make a habit of becoming annoying and spammy. On Pinterest, remember to link every photo to a landing page, and on Instagram, be sure to have a Linktree account set up and added to your bio.

Lastly, connect with other fellow affiliates, and exchange ideas, referral links, and discuss strategies to keep finding new ways to promote engaging content on social media.

The Best Social Media Tools For Affiliate Marketers

Apart from each social media platform's specific scheduling and ad tools, here are a few apps you should try out to improve your overall social media strategy and affiliate marketing campaigns.

Before we jump into the list, we just want to touch on something really quick…

As an affiliate marketer, sometimes it is expected of you to do everything - create good content, run ads, network and so on. But keep in mind that it’s ok to ask for help, and don’t shy away from hiring a few people to help you out if the workload is starting to overwhelm you. And you need to start somewhere. Plus, you can also turn to a few AI tools to help you with your affiliate marketing efforts...

Now, let’s see which are the top tools that can make your life easier on social media.

Content Calendar & Social Media Management Tools

When it comes to social media, you need to be highly organized. And the last thing you need is to log in every day and manually post across different social media platforms. That’s why you need platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer. These tools can help you schedule your affiliate marketing posts in advance and have every post for every platform show up in a single calendar.  

Having a consistent stream of social media posts ready to go out each week, or each month, depending on how ahead you are with your content, is the optimal strategy. However, don’t forget to actually pop in every once in a while on the actual social pages to answer comments and see how your affiliate marketing posts are doing.

Visual Content Creator Tools

For those popping visuals and high quality images, you need a couple of resources that help boost your creativity. 

For creating unique graphics, you can give Canva a try, and you can also check out Unsplash or Pexels whenever you need to grab a few stock images. And don’t worry if you’re on a tight budget; Unsplash and Pexels are free, and Canva has a free trial version available.

Analytics Tools

If you want to see how your affiliate marketing campaigns are performing, make sure to review the data on each social media channels’ analytics dashboard... For extra info, you can also use Google Analytics to track certain performance metrics, such as traffic, ROI, conversions, and more. Tracking links is also something you should look into.

Plus, if you want to improve your content and add a little SEO into the mix, make sure to check out SEMRush. Keyword research can play a huge role in your content strategy, and SEMRush allows you to research your competitors and see which keywords people in the industry are ranking for.

Final Thoughts

So, these are all the tips and tricks on how to use social media for affiliate marketing. You already have the blueprint laid out right in front of you, and now, all you need to do is follow these steps. If you commit to your work, hopefully, you will start seeing results sooner rather than later.

Work with one social media platform in the beginning and expand to another later on - and most importantly - make sure you crush it with your content. Make sure you take the necessary time to learn how ads work and utilize every resource available on the internet that can improve your work. 

And remember, if things ever get too intense, don’t hesitate to outsource some of your work.

Want to become a Digistore24 affiliate? Simply go here to register for free.