MarketingSherpa Blog

Relationships are important when you’re an affiliate manager. The more you know about affiliates on a personal level, the more you’ll know about how they sell your product.

Trisha Lyn Fawver, Director of Affiliate Marketing, New Edge Media, connects with her affiliates on social media sites. It adds to the number of channels that affiliates can reach her and facilitates the flow of ideas, she says.

“We’re using social media to really connect with the affiliates themselves and give them ideas on different things they could be doing.”

“It’s also in hopes that when they do get an idea that may be a little risky, a little on the edge maybe of the terms and conditions, they’re more likely to come to us.”

Fawver suggested approaching the affiliates like a real person, not a boss.

“[Social networks] are where they’re going to be a real person, not to be an affiliate marketer. You want to come at them as a real person.”

So say “Hi, I’m your affiliate manager, how are you?” or “how’s it going?” rather than “here’s everything you should be doing at work.” The conversation will eventually work its way to professional topics. Even when it does, try to keep the personal connection going.

Fawver’s interacting with about 5% of her affiliates online, she says, mostly on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter works best, she says, and she avoids using MySpace for the task.

Perhaps MySpace is the least professional of the major social networks?

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking Evangelism Community Tags: affiliates, social media