When the news of the recent attacks on Mumbai was not broken on a 24 hour news network but on Twitter, many sceptics started to sit up and take note of the power of this superficially simple social networking site. It has become such an internet institution in such a short space of time that a whole new dictionary of terms relating to its use could be and indeed has been written – essentially prefixing everything with “tw”. Twitter has even been used by media outlets to harvest information from the public when they want to get opinions on worldly happenings. This has made journalists jobs even easier, but on the flip side allows more unfiltered public opinion to clog the airwaves. But that’s a topic for another day.

Explosive Growth
Between February 2008 and the same month this year, Twitter’s user base grew from under half a million to over seven million, and that’s just within the USA. Whilst this doesn’t quite match the initial growth of other online leviathans such as Google or facebook, when you consider that Twitter’s micro blogging environment could be considered essentially a big online blackboard and little else it’s impressive. So as growth continues, how can enterprising affiliate marketers take advantage of this new platform?

Leveraging Twitter as an Affiliate
Whilst Twitter may originally have been conceived as a way for average Joes to let friends and family know what we’re up to on a minute-by-minute scale, more and more people are now searching for and following relevant posts. Of course for some people this simply means checking out what their favourite celebrity had for lunch, but there are already many people out there who’ve taken Twitter and put an affiliate spin on it. The driving force behind Twitter’s growth so far has been seen by experts to be this constant stream of news and information that is accessible to anyone, with access online as well as on mobile devices proving integral to this growth. With the largest demographic aged between 35-49 it is far less a kid’s social environment than many other social media sites.

So Twitter allows you to follow and converse with a diverse audience around the world which some see as a perfect opportunity to promote affiliate product links by embedding links in their Tweets in order to get conversions. However, because Twitter almost begs you to type and reply there can be the urge to spam affiliate links as frequently and liberally as you can all over the Twittersphere. This, as you might imagine, is not the best tactic. At best you’ll just annoy other users and you won’t make any money, and at worst you’ll get kicked off Twitter altogether.

Targeted Constraint
Like all good affiliate marketing, exploiting Twitter to your own benefit can be handled effectively if you are interesting, subtle and relevant in all of your Tweets. If you’ve built up a few followers, make sure that you’re linking to things that you would normally talk about in your Tweets and don’t just whack an affiliate link at the end of an irrelevant post. This means that you can be informative and get people interested in your feed without angering them with blatant affiliate tactics. Another tip for affiliate marketing in Twitter is not to link straight to a merchant via an affiliate link but rather embed a link in a Tweet that takes users to your own affiliate website or blog which is of course designed to leverage and monetise traffic whilst being seen to be of value. That way you are far more likely to monetise your Twitter presence. This also means that you can easily promote your own affiliate site, and Twitter is becoming a growing consideration in social media optimisation (SMO).

Short Attention Spans
Needless to say, a micro blogging site inherently attracts people with short attention spans. It is also important to realise that though Twitter offers you a huge global audience, they are perhaps the most fragile and fickle online audience out there because it’s so easy for people to stop listening to what you’ve got to say and start listening to others. This is why subtlety is the key, and as every good affiliate blogger knows you can’t just assault the reader with marketing at every turn as people will quickly switch off and you’ll lose your audience of potential customers. Twitter allows a lot of interaction between you and other users, so it’s important that you don’t just cast out your thoughts and your links and then ignore any responses from your audience. Twitter can be used not just as a marketing tool but as a way of researching and gathering information and opinion that will prove useful to your cause. As we all know, the greater your understanding of your target audience, the bigger the monthly commission payments!

Twitter is still a growing online universe, the limits of which have yet to be tested, and for an affiliate marketer it will no doubt develop into a new tool of the trade, although to what extent remains to be seen. Twitter is unique in the degree of personal interaction it affords users, so if you want to make the most of its astronomic growth you’ll have to be a people person and be genuine and informative to get conversions.

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