As you’ve probably guessed by my last post I’m a bit of a twitter fan but for me the jury is still out on whether or not recent affiliate twitter practices are acceptable/advisable/ethical (delete where applicable) and should be allowed to continue.
Today Lee over at leemccoy put up a great post on how best to use Twitter for affiliate marketing purposes. Not just the usual “how to make more commission” but also touches on gaining feedback and engaging with site visitors, networking with merchants and PR companies. All good stuff.
It’s the first part however (the making money bit) that got me thinking and wanted to explore a little more.
Put yourself in the users shoes
I totally applaud Lee’s use of technology and out of the box thinking but for a second put yourself in the users’ shoes…
There will be those users that are more than happy that you’ve helped them out. There will also be others that might find this type of contact uncalled for and inappropriate.
Initially the user is sending a tweet to their followers or friends – who best to get trusted advice from than your friends right? Most affiliates on the other hand were never part of this group, do’t know the person from Adam but have been using tools to monitor keywords and have detected an opportunity to step in – all very Orwellian :)
To be honest I still think that’s fair play, affiliates have made use of publicly available information and tools. But… what if we fast forward 12 months and this type of thing is common practice amongst affiliates? What if 20 affiliates all get back to a random person they have never met “recommending” products? What if 100 affiliates did it?
What if the affiliate has never even tried or owned the product they are recommending? Does that even matter? At what level would this be considered spam by the user? I spoke to an affiliate recently who was thinking about creating an automated twitter script that does the hard work for them. I shudder to think how well that’ll go down.
On a different note
And then of course there’s the old age question, should you or should you not disclose the fact that you stand to earn commission? Another topic, another day I guess.
Users can of course opt out of the “public timeline” so their tweets are not visible to all and sundry but I believe this is set to “off” by default when you create a Twitter account. Perhaps twitter will reverse this in the future?
Like I say I’m still undecided on whether this type of activity is completely fair game or borderline abuse. I guess time will tell but in the mean time I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
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Completely agree with you Paul!
As with any medium there are those affiliates that will abuse it. Just look at undesired brand bidding, unwarranted voucher code use, unethical cookie stuffing. Anything that us “good” affiliates use will be abused by those affiliates that don’t care for either the industry or those they directly affect.
People have the choice to follow me back – many don’t. But a good number of welcomed the few replies I’ve made and contributed to the site. I’m not one of those MLM tweeps that are following everyone just to get more people into their 2nd tier.
I just hope people will use twitter properly – unfortunately I doubt we’ll be that lucky!
Hey Lee,
Glad you took the post in good spirit as it was meant. I’m in agreement with you too, there’s always a few that ruin it for the rest. Hopefully merchant’s T+C’s won’t be updated on mass with “twitter restrictions” before the real benefits can shine through.
I tend to think that if current affiliate twitter practices are unacceptable, twitter will find a way to prevent them. Discussing it won’t really affect that.
Hi Mogul,
I’m going to have to disagree with you there. The purpose of the posts isn’t to campaign against this practice but to simply raise awareness, stimulate debate and generally get a feel for what others think of this issue. Discussing it will help in all these areas.
This has been my question for a while, too. I hardly ever visit the public timeline and do ask for affiliate links to the people I am following to pay it forward when I buy products online. Many people I know will note on their Twitter when they are dropping affiliate links as well. Not sure how Twitter will regulate, but maybe they will start taking some cuts in the future somehow….
good post and great topic. Twitter is attracting a lot of attention lately and now unfortunately a lot of spam. That being said i have seen some very smart publisher using the tool to create shopping alert services to deal finder twitter streams.I am curious to see how well they do vs. the social recommendation thru friends on twitter w/ affiliate links in the Tweets..
We have a very large affiliate social media marketing channel on our platform. But its made up of affiliates using everything else other than Twitter. Does anyone know of any success stories on the scale of affiliates using facebook or myspace? I think that’s the biggest issue with Twitter from an affiliate perspective. How do you get enough users to make it scale to a meaningful amount of traffic and transations.
@mediatrustpete
I think most of them abuse it that’s why there were so many Twitter users are being banned or blocked. Or maybe they are just smart because they know that Twitter can give them traffic and more leads effectively. :-) You will not be blocked and you can get more traffic if you will use Twitter properly.
Agreed! we are very active Twitter users for @mediatrust. It is now one of the top 3 in traffic referrals to our company site and blogs. It is extremely effective when used properly. It is great to see how fast the spammers are getting shut down on the platform.
@mediatrustpete