Margie Barkley: Social Media Marketing is a Risk

Bloggers and affiliate marketers can make great use of social media marketing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter to generate traffic and income.

Particularly, I think of fashion and beauty bloggers who upload videos to YouTube with affiliate links in their video descriptions. Then, they post links to the videos from other social media accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter.

It’s all fine and dandy until one of your social media marketing accounts is suspended for reasons that you may not have expected.

One of my YouTube videos had more than a quarter-million views in 2011.

I made that video with Adsense, directing viewers to my affiliate marketing blog. It was a great source for income until it was marked as spam. YouTube reviewers took it for granted and didn’t bother to look at it. YouTube rules stated that the video was fine, but it was removed anyway, and my income plummeted.

The “How Affiliate Marketing Works” video was eventually replaced by me. You’ll be surprised at how few people it’s had over the past 10 years, as it was marked as “age-restricted”.

The’someone’ that marked the video spam was actually a Facebook friend and influencer. He took issue with my request to him be civil and courteous with my Facebook friends. Based on the information I have about him, he was/was a bully who was likely jealous of my success.

The lesson is that you don’t need to say anything. You can simply delete their comments on your Facebook page. They won’t notice, so they won’t (hopefully!) take revenge.

Even worse than the video being removed from YouTube, I lost my Twitter account with 15.5K followers.

How can I delete my Twitter account?

Simply because I don’t have access to my old phone number. It was a U.S. phone number that I used during our winters in Arizona. Unfortunately, I didn’t change it back to my Canadian number before we returned home to Canada in spring 2019. The phone contract expired while we were stuck in Canada with COVID. Despite numerous attempts to change the number back to my Canadian number on Twitter, they have no way of reaching me by phone or to resolve the issue I have with that account.

You don’t have to start an uprising to lose your social media marketing accounts or the income you earn from them.

Only one thing is required: a social media account you don’t like or where there is no way to contact the people who manage it.

The bottom line is that you still need a website in order to market your products. Although you can link to the website via your social media accounts, do not rely solely on them to monetize your company. Your social media accounts will soon be useless if there is one bully, bad reviewer or other asshole.

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Cheers,

sig-ros