In the digital marketing world where Facebook and Instagram draw marketers like flies to a flame, you can’t ignore the massive untapped userbases resting a click away. Whether an advertiser, publisher, or affiliate network, you must be enticed by the billions of dollars just floating there for the taking, waiting for you to come and show what your affiliate digital marketing prowess can do.
Indeed, affiliate marketing on social media has tremendous potential and – most importantly – room for everyone. No one says you can grow to the size of Amazon Associates overnight, but you don’t even have to. Social media are so vast that any well-marketed product can find its place in the sun.
Source: Statista
From stellar content to social media influencers to cross-promotion, there are many ways to turn your social media affiliate marketing into a goldmine. The world is really your oyster here – you just have to know the ways.
Don’t blame the algorithms – harness them to make money from Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media.
Without further ado, let’s dig into the nitty gritty of affiliate digital marketing and see how you can synergize affiliate marketing with social media, getting the best bang for the buck there.
In short, affiliate digital marketing business boils down to exchanging promotion efforts for the agreed-upon commission from the sale. In the world of performance marketing, though, there’s much more to affiliate digital marketing than just snapping a few dollars from the sale.
Besides the commission, affiliate digital marketing is a surefire way to expose your brand to new audiences, increase and optimize your lead flows, and synergize your value proposition with a chosen affiliate product.
| Advertisers | Promote their products or services through affiliates or affiliate networks |
| Affiliates | Promote advertiser’s products or service in exchange for a commission from the sales |
| Affiliate Networks | Connect advertisers and affiliates in exchange for a commission |
| Customers | Purchase the product in question |
The only optional party to the affiliate digital marketing ecosystem is an affiliate network, which may or may be an intermediary between social media affiliates and advertisers. Sometimes advertisers and affiliates partner directly through brand affiliate programs run by advertisers.
Here’s how a typical affiliate digital marketing model works:
Social media affiliate marketing is no different by any means of imagination. With quality content at the core, you can promote third-party products to your subscribers and followers, leveraging affiliate digital marketing as a side hustle or even your primary income source.
Here are the high-ticket affiliate digital marketing niches to capitalize on.
As different as social media platforms are, some rules – or rather marketing best practices – pertain to all of them, making up a behavior code to follow. From authenticity to disclosure to relevance, there are quite a few easy practices to level up your affiliate digital marketing game.
| Disclose your affiliate partnerships | Be transparent about affiliate links and commissions to build rapport with your audience and comply with regulations like the ones enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Here’s a disclaimer example:
You can make the disclosure even more detailed. For example, you can mention that you don’t receive anything from the advertiser barring the commission for promoting their product. Anyway, the gist is to clarify that you will receive profit if someone uses your link or promo code. |
| Polish your affiliate links | Disclosing affiliate links doesn’t mean leaving them unpolished. A good affiliate link must be descriptive, concise, and clean. For that, you can use an URL shortener.
This affiliate link is messy and suspicious, with many confusing parameters and no message to remember.
This one is tidy and clean, with the website name at the forefront and no confusing symbols. All other things being equal, most users will choose this link over the previous one. |
| Gain exposure with hashtags | On most social media platforms, you can use hashtags to maximize reach and engagement. For example, if you promote home insurance, you can include several types of hashtags:
Don’t use more than ten hashtags to avoid losing focus and appearing spammy. Not only do social networks frown upon hashtag stuffing, but users themselves find it unappealing and confusing. For example, Instagram posts with three to four hashtags have proven to be the most effective in collecting user impressions. |
| Use social media ads | The ever-growing social media ad revenues unequivocally point out the effectiveness of social media ads. Most social media platforms offer their own ads, with the rare exceptions being Medium, Flickr, and a few other less popular networks. On most social media, you can leverage photo, video, story, and carousel ads to hit the right audience at the right time. On platforms that do not offer paid ads, you can use influencer marketing, native advertising, and sponsored content. |
| Exchange data for value | Placing an affiliate link won’t cut it unless you surround it with valuable content. On the other hand, you can turn your most valuable materials into gated assets – e-books, webinars, whitepapers, free access to paid functionality, etc. – that you unlock in exchange for, say, filling out the form. |
There’s no universal affiliate marketing strategy for all social networks, but one good thing about Facebook is that everyone is there. Boosting around three billion monthly users and counting, Facebook – now governed by Meta – draws well over $100 billion in revenues annually and is by far the biggest social media for affiliate marketing.
Source: Statista
Facebook is one of the most consistent platforms with grown-up audiences, including business professionals looking for B2B opportunities. In-depth social media posts in a Facebook group – the feature that puts Facebook miles ahead of other social networks – may not create as much buzz as cat videos on Instagram but are more likely to hit a solvent target audience, translating into customers and commissions.
Source: Wordstream
Likewise, you can capitalize on Facebook ads, which you can place on Facebook’s right-hand column, Facebook Messenger, Marketplace, and Stories, among other options. In fact, 96% of marketers believe Facebook news feed is the most successful place for ads. You can start small, making your ads as focused as possible – remember, you can only promote your blogs, not affiliate links – and increasing your ad budget as you gain footing in the game.
Source: Klientboost
Besides, you can promote affiliate products within native posts on your profile page. Although direct affiliate links are not allowed in native content, you can:
Want to know about performance marketing on Facebook? Here’s your definitive guide to affiliate digital marketing on Facebook in 2023 and beyond.
If there’s one golden goose for visual-reliant affiliates, it’s Instagram, arguably the second-best social media for affiliate marketing, now under the Meta shelter. Having doubled its ad revenues from $17.4 in 2020 to around $40 billion in 2023, Instagram offers reels, stories, and its new IGTV video platform for under-hour-long videos.
Source: Cristiano Ronaldo
As a social media affiliate marketer, you can easily leverage the ever-growing affiliate toolkit, including (make sure to sign up as a Creator to have affiliate digital marketing features enabled):
Source: Instagram
Speaking of Instagram Stories, this feature collected around 500 million daily users in 2019 alone and is excellent for directing watchers toward the affiliate product via link stickers or discount codes.
Source: Instagram
Instagram is really going the extra mile to make the shopping experience entertaining for customers and easy and profitable for marketers. For example, you can tag affiliated products in reels, allowing your subscribers to shop on the fly while watching your content (Instagram Live) or add shopping stickers to your stories featuring the product in question.
Instagram itself offers useful advice on elevating your sales:
To circumvent the harsh “one-link-in-bio” limitation on Instagram and other social media networks, you can create a landing page with your links and send your subscribers there, like in the example below.
Source: DoDropshipping
A video-sharing giant that revolutionized the industry, TikTok is all the rage among teens and young adults, with 30% of users spending around an hour per week on the platform. There’s no doubt you can use this social media for affiliate marketing, tapping into young audiences.
That said, from the perspective of affiliate digital marketing, TikTok is incredible. With 2 billion monthly users, it’s no surprise that, according to Statista, 43% of marketers are going to increase their promotional campaigns on TikTok, including creating profiles and creative challenges. One brand that has fully embraced the power of TikTok is Netflix, with over 35 million subscribers and 800 million likes.
Here’s how to start affiliate marketing on TikTok as a TikTok affiliate:
To see how affiliate digital marketing can work on TikTok, type “affiliate” in the search bar. Take, for example, this search result (appeared the first at the time of search):
The convenient video length – from 15 seconds to three minutes if you create a video within the app and up to ten minutes if you upload a video – allows for long content like in the example. You have all the time in the world to promote your product through a 15-second viral video or an elaborate minutes-long discussion.
You can’t put an affiliate link directly in your TikTok videos but are free to place it in your bio, driving users there from your videos.
Last but not least, it’s worth remembering that TikTok affiliate marketing is all about short, trend-driven, viral content for Gen Z. The average TikTok video duration for clips collecting over 25,000 views is only 42 seconds, making overly long videos a dubious choice for this platform.
Another social media for affiliate marketing you might want to avail of is Pinterest. Home to over 80 million monthly users in the United States alone, Pinterest is sometimes treated as a smaller version of Instagram, and quite mistakenly. Using Pinterest for affiliate marketing differs from using Instagram for the same purpose because of the differences in content type and customer interactions.
| Content | Images and videos representing ideas and inspiration | Images and videos of any purpose and meaning |
| Focus | Finding ideas and inspiration | Sharing experiences with other users |
| Features | Reels, Stories, IGTV | Rich Pints, Themed Boards, Organized Content |
| Link Placement | Pins | Bio and Stories |
| Longevity | Evergreen | Short-lived |
But wait…Does Pinterest allow affiliate links?
Using Pinterest for affiliate marketing is quite simple because the platform allows affiliate links in pin descriptions (according to Pinterest affiliate marketing rules at the time of writing). In a way, affiliate marketing and Pinterest are a match made in heaven, as you can promote products legally without any hindrance.
Here’s how to start affiliate marketing on Pinterest:
Affiliate marketing with Pinterest isn’t hard – remember, posting affiliate links on Pinterest is free – but there’s a nuance: Pinterest has a high potential for evergreen content, allowing you to get traffic from successful pins months and years after the pin was posted. Indeed, using Pinterest for affiliate marketing isn’t as much about spamming pins around the clock as it is about refining your best content to squeeze the maximum value out of it.
Here’s how you can improve your affiliate digital marketing lead generation without much effort and risk.
Source: Pinterest
Likewise, Pinterest is quite SEO-dependent, making it crucial to optimize your pins for keywords and leverage Rich Pins, the feature enabling a more detailed pin description, including product availability and pricing.
Overall, you must learn to write keyword-rich descriptions with attractive CTAs and follow these simple native monetization recommendations. Besides Rich Pins, among the best marketing practices are including the disclosure in the pin description, creating several pins per post to increase exposure, pinning to group boards, and automating and analyzing your pin performance.
Source: Pinterest
And if you really want to stand out, you can enable the Try On feature for your products so that Pinterest users can try them using augmented reality. Try On isn’t suitable for all products, but it can give you an edge if you advertise beauty products or furniture: rotating pieces or arranging them virtually in your space really helps!
Source: Pinterest
Now that you know how to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest, you need a single winning ingredient in your performance marketing strategy: social media marketing software. Read on to learn to synergize social media tools to grow your business as an affiliate or advertiser.
Pinterest allows leveraging performance marketing automation software – every social media for affiliate marketing does. From collecting customer data to optimizing the customer journey to selling your leads at the best price, marketing automation solutions can take your affiliate digital marketing to the next level.
And now – drumroll – you can get everything mentioned within a single marketing automation software suite like Phonexa.
How is that possible? Read on to discover how to reinvent your affiliate digital marketing with Phonexa.
Phonexa offers an all-in-one performance marketing software suite that will close the loop between leads, calls, clicks, and revenue, unlocking your affiliate campaigns and customers for you. The eight proprietary tools make up a comprehensive management system covering your marketing cycle through and through.
Here are some of the major digital marketing breakthroughs you can achieve with Phonexa:
With Lynx, you can ensure:
Long story short, Lynx puts you in the driver’s seat of the affiliate digital marketing game, with every bit of statistics and campaign management options available from a single all-encompassing dashboard.
Generating affiliate customers is only half the battle – the other half is to sell them at the best price while not hurting customer experiences. With ping tree technology, you can strategically connect your PPC, SEO, SMS, or call leads to an optimal buyer through a multi-tier marketplace abundant with reputable advertisers.
Whether you sell leads or generate them for your own business, LMS Sync will automatically track, route, and analyze your lead flows, including real-time reports and the ping tree system to optimize your lead sales process.
What LMS Sync does to web leads, Call Logic does to phone calls. You will know what marketing channel, ad, and keyword drive your calls and how they get to the destination point, whether your or the advertiser’s sales team.
By pairing historical and real-time data, AI-driven algorithms can simulate your affiliate campaigns – any number of campaigns with different variables – without any real investment. In just a few minutes, you will have a detailed picture of whether your efforts should go and how you can optimize your affiliate digital marketing campaigns.
Every tool mentioned — and many more — comes within Phonexa’s all-encompassing marketing automation software suite, available from $100 a month.
Choose your plan now, or schedule a free consultation to learn more about how Phonexa can elevate your affiliate digital marketing.
Applying to social media, affiliate digital marketing is a type of performance marketing where a social media affiliate promotes an advertiser’s product – directly or through an affiliate network – in exchange for a commission from a purchase, click, impression, installation, download, subscription, etc.
More often than not, the attribution of clicks, purchases, downloads, etc., is done through trackable affiliate links that connect social media affiliates, advertisers, and customers. However, there may be other attribution methods, such as coupon and QR codes, customer IDs, promotional URLs, and pixel tracking.
Here’s more info about channel attribution risk and hurdles in affiliate digital marketing.
That said, affiliate links are, by and large, the most accurate affiliate tracking method, less prone to errors and misattribution. Most affiliate programs, including social media marketing affiliate programs, prefer to use affiliate links as the primary tracking method.
Affiliate links are tracking URLs provided to affiliates by advertisers or affiliate networks.
Here’s an example of an affiliate link:
Upon a purchase or other agreed-upon target action, the affiliate will receive a commission from the advertiser.
Visually, affiliate links may or may not look different on the customer’s side. When a customer clicks on a link – during the redirection process – they will likely see the “ref=affiliate123’ tracking part, but not necessarily so after the redirection is finished. Customers are often unaware of and not interested in the tracking process happening behind the scenes.
While affiliate digital marketing through social media is already extremely popular and only gaining momentum, there’s no single best social media for affiliate marketing business because of the differences in social media audiences.
While visually appealing Instagram may suit visually-reliant brands that target younger audiences, Facebook allows for a broader range of marketing strategies, including text-heavy posts and content for older customers. Likewise, affiliate marketing on TikTok usually relies on creative, concise, and engaging visuals geared toward the youngest audience.
Industry-wise, retail holds the highest share (44%) of the total affiliate revenue, followed by telecom and media (25%), and travel and leisure (16%). The United States is the largest social media advertising market, ahead of China, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
It goes without saying not all brands can benefit equally from affiliate digital marketing on social media because of the inclination of social media platforms towards short-lived content that provides instant gratification and legal and compliance restrictions that industries like finance or pharmaceuticals might face.
Besides social media for affiliate marketing, you can leverage your website, blog, email, and other performance marketing channels if you provide valuable content for your readers. In fact, the most popular affiliate digital marketing channels are blogs (27.8%), followed by review sites (18.7%), coupon sites (14.8%), newsletters, and editorial sites.
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