Yesterday, I tweeted asking people for a recommendation on a good coffee grinder suitable for espresso grind, and a friend has recommended me a good one, linking to Amazon through his affiliate link. You may read the rest of story here, but my today’s focus is not on that story alone.
Today I didn’t tweet about anything that would’ve qualified me as a good target for the following, but I got something that drew my attention — a re-tweet entitled “5,000 Coupon Codes.” Naturally, I clicked the link, and found a truly giant list of deals’ descriptions from hundreds of merchants. (Advice #1: Don’t overwhelm the end user by posting thousands of deals on the same page; categorize your deals by merchant name, theme, holiday, or something… Make it convenient!) By having a closer look I’ve found the majority of “claim coupon” coupons to be going through GoldenCan URLs, and some through DataFeedFile ones, both being automated datafeed-import tools that also support coupon feeds. (Advice #2: Cloak affiliate URLs if you don’t want to fall an easy prey of a site scraper.) Upon doing a bit of additional research, I saw the same tweet re-tweeted 5 more times, and some of the people who re-tweeted it had no idea they were re-tweeting someone’s list of affiliate links.
Can everyone see the drastic difference between the yesterday’s link I’ve received from @Jangro via Twitter, and the one I have received today? One cared, provided genuine advice and added value. The other one, in my opinion, simply looked for some easy cash.
With time, more and more affiliates will be using Twitter for the promotion of their links. If you are an affiliate and you ever look into marketing on Twitter, I highly advise you to do it responsibly, and treat the recipients of your posts (and potential recipients through re-tweets) as you would want to be treated yourself. Add value!
“I saw the same tweet re-tweeted 5 more times, and some of the people who re-tweeted it had no idea they were re-tweeting someone’s list of affiliate links.”
Isn’t that a sign that those that re-tweeted did see enough value in that list of coupons to at least take the step to re-tweet it? Maybe other followers got value out of it too.
In other tweets from the same person, it was pretty clear that he’s connected to that site. I think the 5000 coupon codes tweet was more about showing his latest work (and test its virality) than to lure some shoppers. He didn’t get 1000+ followers by spamming them.
I think the main difference between the two approaches was that yours was very personalized while his was far less personalized. There are benefits and drawbacks to both.
“I think the 5000 coupon codes tweet was more about showing his latest work (and test its virality) than to lure some shoppers.”
Could be. It just didn’t look that way to me, and I could be wrong. I am a big fan of personalized, value-adding products/marketing methods. The first example really cared to help me, whereas the second one looked like a piece of mass-mailing.
The more I think about it, the more believe that it’s about the wording. With only 140 characters at your disposal, much success depends on about how you word it.
Having read today’s “Tweet. tweettweet. ReTweeting by the numbers” article by @lieblink, it looks like while the 5000 coupons tweet lacked personalization, it had something else to it, which made people re-tweet it. It had 3 out of 5 things that people love to re-tweet:
(i) Timely Content (the economy is still bad, and all the major holidays have passed; enticing the consumer by coupons is now the way to go)
(ii) Freebies are Popular
(iii) So are Lists
Had it been made into a blog post about the a project that uses Twitter as its main or one of its main marketing vehicles, it would’ve hit all 5. 🙂
A couple more posts on the topic that are worth reading (see the comments under them too):
* Affiliate Links In Twitter, Part 2 by @jangro
* Affiliate Marketing on Twitter, oh My! by @adamviener