A lot of internet marketers and businesses spend a lot of time on Twitter… everyone knows that. It kind of seems like common sense to me that they wouldn’t do that if they weren’t promoting their businesses in some way… Right?
I came across an article written by Steve Hodson over at The Inquisitr called Is Twitter the next affiliate link hunting ground? In the article Steve talks about someone who placed an Amazon affiliate link in one of his Twitter posts using one of the “tiny link” services.
Apparently, it kind of ticked him off.
His argument against putting an affiliate link in the Twitter post is that:
“Affiliate sales are one of the largest money makers on the web but typically users visiting a site or blog will be able to tell that the links are indeed affiliate links; whether it by by disclaimers by the author or other means. Sure there are the unscrupulous ones who do everything they can to hide them but in general most bloggers are up front about this sort of thing.”
What?!?
Since when do you need to put a big sign on every one of your affiliate links to let every visitor know that the link goes to a product that they might be interested in, but it’s not yours?
Obviously you have to have terms of service, legal, and privacy statements on your blog, which Twitter has too, but this guy is a bit over the top!
After all, no one is holding a gun to anybody’s head to make them click on those links!
On Twitter, if anyone was putting too much junk out there, no one would follow them and they would eventually lose out on any marketing momentum they gained from using Twitter in the first place.
“With Twitter though there is no room for disclaimers or notices about affiliate links regardless of how honourable the person posting might be – or might not be. how are we going to know that the link we just clicked isn’t going to take us to some marketing page that we never wanted to go to.”
I’m not sure you ever know, with absolute certainty, where any link is going to lead you. It’s just part of internet life.
Since Twitter is built on a social system where no one gets noticed (followed, indexed, etc.) unless others are following them, spammers will never really make any headway there. Twitter has been around since April 2007, so if the spammers were going to really sink their teeth into it, they would have already.
I think the idea of putting affiliate links on Twitter is kind of rude, but it doesn’t really bother me when it only happens once in a while… What do you think?
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Tagged with: SMM
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing • Blog Marketing • Online Mistakes • Other Gurus • SMM • Viral Marketing • Web 2.0
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