Because billions of people use social media in their daily lives, more and more merchants and their affiliates are using it as a tool to grow their brand awareness, acquire customers and retain them.
Facebook is the biggest player in the social media market. By its own count, Facebook has 1.18 billion daily active users on average for September 2016 and approximately 85 percent are outside the U.S. and Canada. According to this Experian statistic found on Statista, Facebook is far and away the most popular social network in the U.S. and worldwide.
There are five important tactics that affiliate marketers should use to successfully leverage Facebook as a business tool for affiliate marketing:
- Understand your target audience
- Create relevant and valuable content
- Cultivate proactive interactions
- Connect to influencers to amplify your message
- Expand your reach through Facebook ads
Understand Your Target Audience
Before you start posting or creating ads, you should first define the purpose of your Facebook Page. Are you trying to increase brand awareness or get people to take concrete actions like start a free trial or become a subscriber? When you begin by answering, “Who is this Page for?” you set the stage for a focused and effective Facebook presence.
Create Relevant and Valuable content
After determining your target group, you can concentrate on consistently delivering high quality content. There are three things to consider when developing your Facebook content strategy:
- Variety of posts
- Frequency of posts
- Effectiveness of posts
Even if the main purpose of your Page is to drive downloads or purchases, you should still engage your target audience with a variety of content. Find a good balance between posting entertaining and informative thought leadership content, sharing content from influencers, posting self-serving business messaging, and promoting your partners’ products.
Then decide how often you will post each type of post. But your job isn’t over; you need to see how effective your posts are.
To determine the quality of your posts, monitor engagement metrics to see “what’s working and not working on your Page, understand the people who like your Page and engage with your posts, and make decisions about the best ways to connect with your audience.”
Cultivate Proactive Interactions
Proactive interactions are very important to your success in the Facebook community. The four main interactions on Facebook are:
- Likes and other reactions
- Shares
- Comments
- Follows
One way to generate these interactions for your Page and posts is to keep in mind that “you get what you give.” People will take note of you when you interact with them. Besides reacting, commenting and sharing posts from other people and Pages, it is also good to join or even create Facebook groups and community pages on relevant topics. These actions will lead to visibility, awareness, trust and reach.
Connect to Influencers to Amplify Your Message
It is crucial to connect with influencers or partners who already have an audience. The phrase “you get what you give” is also useful here. When you are more visible to your industry’s influencers, you are in a better position to tap into their extensive network. This increases your chances of them sharing your posts or mentioning you in their posts. Start by sharing and mentioning these influencers on your Page. This is part of creating a productive and mutually beneficial social media relationship.
Expand Your Reach Through Facebook Ads
Another way of growing your reach and achieving your business objectives is through Facebook Ads. These Ads are cheaper than Google AdWords and allow you to customize targeting to achieve a broad reach with minimal effort. Your Ads will be shown in other people’s feeds even if they do not follow your page and have never been in contact with you before. In fact, Facebook ensures that Ads are more visible to users than their organic friends posts. The range of your advertisement depends on the amount of money you are investing — the more money you invest, the larger the audience you can build.
The different social media platforms have a lot in common since all of them are based on leveraging your audience and encouraging interactions with your content. Therefore, you can adapt these five affiliate marketing tactics for Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
Keystone
Facebook, and other social networks, are increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness of their brands and capture new customers and revenue. In order to leverage these networks successfully, make sure you define your target audience, create engaging content, and amplify your reach through influencers and Ads.
Jannis Jörger is an Online Marketing Coordinator at cleverbridge.
Learn more about Managed Affiliate Services at cleverbridge.
