Social Media and Affiliate Sites or Brands

I sat in on a great session at Link Share symposium that was centered on social media and its role with brands and websites.  While the session was amazing, it was geared more towards offline brands and businesses that were trying to make their presence known online.   

Over the last week, I’ve been kicking around ideas and ways that social media could be used to benefit online affiliates, or more importantly, online financial affiliates.  Here are a few tips and suggestions that I came up with that tie into the session:

Assign a Community Manager

• Make sure you have someone setup to manage and encourage people in your company to engage in social media.  But what if you’re a one-man show?  Set reminders throughout the day to stop what you’re doing and actively engage in social media marketing for 20-minutes or so and then go back to what you were working on prior to that. 
  

Benefiting from Social Media and the Results

• Set your baseline.  This is easy if you are just starting out.  You have nothing to compare it to so just RUN with it!  But if you have been pushing social media and are looking to try something new, make sure you set a baseline and watch for improvements.  This could be measuring the number of followers or fans you get, or the number of people retweeting (RT) or responding to your posts on Facebook.

• For Facebook, you’ll want to establish a fan page and include additional landing pages to keep things interesting. If you’re planning on running advertisements on Facebook, why not utilize some of the awesome free applications that Facebook offers to set up auto feeds from your blog, twitter and Youtube accounts? Over time the goal is to phase out the ads once your fan page has grown to a certain level.

Follow the Big Dogs

• Follow the big guys in your industry.  For our industry, this would mean focusing on the big financial players. Engage with them and utilize their “clout” to increase relevant followers, or those looking to engage more with other financial sites.

I would also suggest a deal of the week or hot offer promotions!  Encourage people to come to your site by talking about weekly specials, offers, or deals.

This is all just my interpretation of what I think are some good ways to utilize social media. Since it is so new, nothing is set in stone.  The best approach you can take is to test, test, and test some more!! Be social about stuff that is relevant to your site or brand and look for ways to engage and interact with your fans or followers.

Corey Bray manages the affiliate team and focuses on business development opportunities for Credit.com. His team's goal is to grow Credit.com's site traffic and exposure in the online credit and financial space.