The ins and outs of affiliate marketing on Twitter

Have you been thinking recently about using social media for your affiliate marketing campaigns? It could give you access to millions of people – and even if a fraction of them click on your affiliate link or visit your blog, that could give you a solid boost in commissions. But which platform to use? Facebook? Instagram? Or maybe even Twitter?

With its 192 million daily active users and 500 million tweets made every day, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. What’s more, you can find a large variety of people and companies on Twitter – from celebrities and politicians to the biggest brands and well-known scientists.

What can make using Twitter for your affiliate tasks challenging, though, is that the platform works in a slightly different way than other well-known platforms. But, don’t worry – we’ll discuss all you need to know about utilizing affiliate marketing on Twitter and show how it’s actually much easier than you might think.

Let’s get right into it.

What is Twitter?

Twitter has around 330 million active users every month. This means that, potentially, many, many people post, read, or share tweets on the platform every single day. That makes Twitter a great place for you to try and find new followers for your blog or promote your affiliate products.

But, what makes Twitter different from other popular platforms, is that they have set a hard limit on how many characters you can use in a post. Compared to a Facebook post, where you can write as many words as you like, Twitter gives you 280 characters and not a single more. It makes sense since Twitter was initially meant to be a platform for sharing breaking news. Short tweets were just the ideal length to write a brief description of an event and then immediately publish it.

How can you encourage people to check out your blog and click on the affiliate link with such a strict limit? Especially since every link (even shortened one) eats up the available characters as well?

If you want to make the most of Twitter marketing, you have to cut to the chase and create concise posts that answer your followers’ questions straight away.

What do you need for Twitter affiliate marketing?

Don’t think that you can just make an account, write your first post with an affiliate link inside and wait for people to follow you. Regardless of the platform, a blank profile with nothing but affiliate links will be marked as spam. Instead, you need to spend some time setting up your main profile and building a follower base. How can I do this you may ask? Here are six main things you should do to get started with marketing on Twitter.

Complete your Twitter Bio

As soon as someone clicks on your profile, they are presented with your photo and your bio – which is all they need to decide whether or not they want to follow you. And now that almost half of Twitter accounts are suspected to be bots, people are going to be rightfully wary of a blank profile with no photo and no description. Again, you’ll have to think about how you can show your personality and encourage people to follow you within a fixed limit of 160 characters only.

If you have a website or blog you want other people to visit, then you should include it in your bio as well – but be careful. If you do this, it will take up much more of your character limit, so be careful what you say when your followers meet you for the first time.

Become active on relevant groups and topics

A massive plus of Twitter is that anyone can see your profile, and you can also message anyone – without needing to be “friends” with them first. But that in no way means that you can just spam around people with affiliate links. As with all other social channels, you first need to build bonds between you and Twitter users from relevant areas – and being active and helpful is the best way to do so.

Look for chats or threads relevant to any topics related to your company’s aims and become active there – reply to tweets, ask questions and share posts from other users. It’s also a nice idea to follow users who post content similar to yours and respond to it often – that will increase the visibility of your profile to their followers, and they might decide to check out your profile as well.

Then, once your follower count increases, spend time interacting with them as well – for example, if someone retweets your post, you can tweet back to them with a response or simply like their post.

Build your follower base

To get affiliate sales from Twitter, you obviously need an audience you can tell about a new product or service. Of course, you could start from posting “into the void,” but there’s little chance you’ll see any clicks coming from it – it’s much more likely your post will simply get buried under the weight of the millions of other posts on Twitter. Plus, Twitter users often look at how many followers a profile already has and whether someone they know is following this profile.

Here, you might feel tempted to buy “packs of followers” from the net to make your account look better – but that’s a bad idea. “Packs of followers” typically have many fake or inactive accounts inside, and Twitter users can spot those from a mile away. If you have 20k followers on your profile, but no one responds to anything you write, then it’s clear your “followers” don’t even exist.

So there’s no shortcut here. If you want to gain followers who will interact with your posts and click on your affiliate links, then you need to put in some effort – follow topics and accounts in your niche, retweet posts related to your product, and help out other users in need.

Take advantage of hashtags

You surely know how hashtags work on Twitter. Upon clicking on one of them, you immediately get a list of posts with that specific hashtag used, and you can sort them in any way you want. So if you want to read posts only on a particular topic, with hashtags, you can quickly find all of them without having to swim through thousands of other posts.

So if you want other people to find your posts as easily, learning how to properly use the hashtags is crucial. How can you find relevant ones though? That’s easy – simply look at what words or phrases are regularly used by other people or companies in your niche. You can also search for common terms related to your product and modify them slightly, so your followers can easily find your other posts.

Don’t overuse hashtags, though – we’ve all seen those posts that have 10 or more barely related hashtags, right? You don’t want your content to feel like those spammy posts – so don’t put more than two hashtags in one post.

Use Twitter ads

If you have a few bucks to spend, you can also use Twitter Ads to promote your posts and drive traffic to your profile. By using the “Promoted Tweets” option, your tweets can appear in the search results or Twitter feed of users that are following a certain topic or were recently searching for given hashtags.

Promoted tweets work exactly like ordinary tweets – they can be liked, shared, or replied to. The only difference is that they will have a “Promoted” label in the left-hand corner. The cost to promote your tweet ranges from $0.50 to $2.00 for each first action, so this might be a very useful option if you want more people to find your posts.

You don’t have to rely only on promoting your posts though – inside the Twitter Ads setting, you can also create campaigns focused on promoting your videos, increasing the number of people that download your app, or building brand awareness.

Keep an eye on your competitors

Do you know what’s also incredibly useful about Twitter? You can use the platform to see what your competitors are doing and learn from both their successes and their mistakes. All you need to do is search for their profile and then follow them to see what they are posting. What hashtags are they using? How are they promoting their posts? How many retweets or comments do they have on their profile?

By analyzing their posts, you can find out what works (and what doesn’t) for them – and then modify those ideas to fit your profile.

Conclusion

It might not be as powerful as Facebook or Instagram, but you can easily find new followers and new ways to promote your blog or channel on Twitter – and get more sales at the end of the day. It might take a bit of time to get the hang out of writing short, but effective, Tweets for your audience, but once you know how to do it, reaching out to the right people and increasing brand awareness or keeping your followers engaged and up to date will be a piece of cake.