Affiliate Marketing and Facebook: The Connection

Affiliate marketing is all about making connections, and so is Facebook. But what's the connection between affiliate marketing and Facebook? Is there really a worthwhile way, as of now, to use Facebook for affiliate marketing purposes?

If not, will Facebook soon become a valuable tool for affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing, Facebook, and Large Numbers

The above questions are best answered, in general terms, with resounding yeses all around. Yes, yes, yes, affiliate marketing aficionados absolutely need to be taking a hard look at Facebook. How to use Facebook for affiliate marketing is difficult, but seeing that will happen is easy.

Indeed, one need only look at the numbers to see that anyone thinking about affiliate marketing needs to be thinking about Facebook. Eye-popping numbers such as:

In April of 2009, Facebook officially hit the 200 million user mark, having doubled its user base within a matter of seven months and change. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is adding 100,000 new users per day. Fully half of all Facebook users visit the site daily. Facebook generates upwards of 40 billion page views per day…

With measurements like those, it's understandable why affiliate marketers are eyeing Facebook with all the subtlety of a lion evaluating a juicy slab of roast zebra.

Not So Fast: Poor Results, Too Many Rules

But wait, there's less. As of now, affiliate marketers who have attempted to leverage Facebook to gain affiliate marketing commissions have reported quite poor results. With a few notable exceptions--direct response dating ads, for example--the cost per action schemes run through Facebook have not yielded reliable profits. Worries are that a "not ready to buy" mentality is culturally built into the Facebook environment, where it's "not cool" to buy and sell stuff.

And then there are the Facebook restrictions on what kind of ads run on its network. Read the full Facebook advertiser guidelines here, and don't think they won't ban you, because they will.

Of course, the number of rules and the rigidity with which they are enforced is completely logical from the perspective of Facebook, but if you're trying to use Facebook for affiliate marketing, the rules can be troublesome. One example of a rule that hurts the affiliate marketing potential of Facebook is the ban on directing users to landing pages that ask for personal information. This rule pretty well kills the lead generation side of Facebook affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing and Facebook Have Officially Friended Each Other

In May of 2009, Facebook announced something called "The Platform," a technology framework that purports to allow third-party developers unprecedented access to actual Facebook pages--and the gargantuan revenue potential therein. Quoth Zuckerberg himself:

"You can serve ads on your app pages and keep all the revenue, sell them yourselves or use a network, and process transactions within the site, keeping all the revenue without diverting users off Facebook."

Does that sound like something you'd be interested in, friend?