We all spend hours on social media. We like, comment, share, and post our news and scroll endlessly to see what other people are up to. Wouldn’t it be great if you could make money just by posting? Well, you can as an Affiliate! Facebook is the biggest social media platform and a target-rich avenue to boost your income. Read on to learn how to use Facebook for your affiliate marketing career.
Facebook is not the first social networking platform. But it is the biggest. Developed in 2004 by college student Mark Zuckerberg, as a way for university students to make friends, today, it has morphed into the biggest social media platform with over one-billion users globally. It’s a social platform that allows you to connect and share everything with your friends and family.
Facebook, now Meta, has evolved since its early days. Today, you can shop, play games, create and join various groups, sell goods on its Marketplace, live stream events, and so much more.
What makes Facebook ideal for affiliates?
Facebook has a billion-plus, ready customer base for you to boost your affiliate link conversions and profits. The wide, global reach Facebook has, gives you access to people with a range of interests. Therefore, whatever your affiliate links are promoting, you’re likely to find a captive audience.
How to win at Facebook affiliate marketing
- Create a Facebook business page
Your friends, family, and neighbours enjoy reading your posts, but they wouldn’t want to be spammed with affiliate links. Affiliate marketing is a business, and you should treat it as one. Create a professional brand that will attract a customer base who are interested in what you have to offer. The best way to do this is by creating a Facebook Business page!
- Build your audience
An audience = potential income. Building an audience comes from creating relationships. When building your business page, you must offer your audience something valuable and assert yourself as an authority in what you offer.
DMing (direct messaging) your current friends aren’t recommended – they probably receive tons of requests and delete them. However, Facebook has given tips on how to grow your page audience which you can read here.
- Engage with your audience
Engaging as an affiliate can be tricky at times. It’s a delicate balance of posting general content and promoting/sharing your affiliate links. Remember, as awesome as it is to get likes, this is not enough. You need to regularly engage with your followers, interact with the comments and answer their questions. So how often should you post in your Facebook group? Post too little and they may forget you. Post too much and they may get annoyed by you. An 80-20 ratio is recommended for Facebook marketing. Post 80% entertaining and educational posts and 20% of the posts should be targeted posts containing your affiliate links.
- Join a group
If you don’t want to create a business page from scratch, then why not join an existing group? Facebook has groups for just about everyone and everything. These groups are made up of like-minded people who share and discuss things they are passionate about. As an Affiliate, you can contribute to a group and leverage these niche audiences. However, your contributions shouldn’t solely be a sales pitch (in fact this is quite frowned upon). Instead:
- Start conversations
- Don’t duplicate content in multiple groups.
- Avoid telling people to ‘inbox you’ for information. Be generous and share it with everyone (easy brownie points).
You can also create a group for your website, if you have one, and create your own network of people to share your links with.
- Use Facebook ads
Facebook advertising is considered a highly effective paid advertising strategy. With billions of users visiting the site each month, it makes sense. What makes these ads so great is that the ads are integrated into your audience’s newsfeed which means they don’t have to ‘skip ads’ like on platforms such as YouTube. You can select what your advertising goal is between awareness, engagement, or conversion and therefore get the results you want. Additionally, the ads are relevant to their individual interests which means your ads will land in front of the right eyes.
- Maximise your insights
Facebook provides you with valuable insights into how your audience engages with your content and how they interact with your posts. Study your insights and find out what works and doesn’t and use this to adjust your affiliate content marketing strategy accordingly. Refer to your insights often to monitor your engagement levels.
- Include an affiliate disclaimer
To succeed as an affiliate, you need to present yourself as a reputable affiliate to your audience. Customers will click and purchase through your links when they believe you and what you say. Exercise transparency when promoting products across your post and you will be viewed as credible to your audience.
Facebook is just one of the many available platforms affiliates can use to promote their products and services. Its large audience base gives it that extra edge over other channels. It needs time and patience to figure out but with time, you will reap the rewards.
