Can Today's Affiliates Compete Without a Social Play?

Your humble host of The BeanCast has has been wrestling with a question recently. I've been helping a friend with several affiliate marketing plays and I've been asking myself:

Can an affiliate marketer be successful today
without leveraging social media?
Affiliate marketing and it's close cousin, multilevel marketing, have been around long before the Internet became popular. The idea of leveraging pure-commission representatives who work their own contact database to sell your product and build your brand has been a tremendously successful formula for a lot of businesses. From Amway to Amazon, building an affiliate base offers one of the best ways to drive revenue. And for the select few motivated affiliates, it offers an outstanding avenue for financial independence.

But what I'm finding as I look deeper, is that social media has dramatically changed this game. You can be the most driven individual with a deep contact list and the best resources, and still be trumped. Because if your competition is using social media effectively, they're heading off your leads up river with a constant stream of personal dialog. And they're doing so in mass-market fashion.

A Few Insights Into The Affiliate Psyche

Affiliate marketing is an incredibility competitive landscape with sometimes hundreds or thousands of individual representatives competing for the same prospects. And unlike in-house sales forces, there are often no territory or contact restrictions. Everyone is fair game.

Thus to succeed you need a combination of aggressiveness and charisma. It's not enough to just get the sale. Affiliate marketers also need to be inspiring. After all, customers can get these products from any number of sources. So a good affiliate marketing always needs to be selling him or herself in equal measure to the products they represent.

Creating Affiliate Rock Stars

Now, along comes the social media landscape. Suddenly, with a single post on Facebook, you are reaching up to 5,000 friends who are completely opted-in. With a single Tweet you could be reaching 10,000 or more willing followers. And unlike with email, you can engage instantly into the conversations of your base, rather than just interrupting them with a message that is out of touch with their current concerns.

For an affiliate marketer, these applications offer the potential power of a mass media buy. It's a chance to be engaging and charming on constant basis to a large audience, thereby building your personal brand. And with barely a single product pitch in the stream, you erode the relationship advantages of your competition. Just by being yourself and showcasing how much fun you and your customers are having, you create the question, "Will I be having this much fun with my rep?" And that's a deadly weapon in such a competitive landscape. You become a rock star. Your competition remains a sales rep.

The Essential Formula?

I won't go so far as to say that every affiliate marketer needs to have a social strategy. Certainly there are many products that don't attract an online audience or vice versa. And obviously, not everyone can achieve rock star status on Twitter. But I think it is obvious that social media is well-suited to the needs of affiliate marketers of all kinds. And if you are an affiliate marketer how has not yet considered the value of working the forums of related sites, participating in blog comments and gaining followers on popular social media applications, you are risking the future of your business.

Image: HubPages