How to make money off of Twitter and Facebook

[Beanie]

This was asked of me by Randy on the PAP radio show (gulp). Well here goes, you can't really. Unless you are really clever and even then I might discourage it. Twitter and Facebook work because they are permission based. If you want to lose 200 friends in 5 minutes start spamming them.

But like anything build some equity and things just happen. I think most affiliates start with the idea of "how do I make money". That is the wrong approach, no one is dying to give you money. Your idea needs to be what niche can I fill that would make a difference to people. If you are a facebook friend of mine (Paul Nobles) you likely know that I am very active. It's not an act, I put in the time. Do I get referrals from all of that activity, certainly I do. But they do it because they trust me and I don't betray that trust by spamming them incessantly.

If you use facebook and twitter as pieces of the puzzle I think you will be happy. If you are looking to them as a sole way to make income I think you are going to be unhappy with the result.

BTW, you can follow me at twitter.com/beaniepoker but I will warn you that I do a lot of testing for bluffware on that site so you might want to turn off device updates.

[Self Made]

Does Facebook's advertising system allow online poker ads?

[JohnH]

No it doesn't.

I think you could make money off of twitter by posting cool poker related stuff and gaining a large following of people who like poker. You wont even need a website... just build up 5k followers and hit them with the occasional affiliate link... you could then take your established brand and launch some sites/ form good partnerships.

Twitter is catching on and in a year or so will be mainstream

[JohnH]

I'll go ahead and say it... twitter will replace the blog

[Mark]

I'll go ahead and say it... twitter will replace the blog

Wow, I'm not so sure. Twitter only allows a certain number of characters per post whereas a blog can have unlimited characters. I think for short information pieces Twitter could replace the blog but for good quality content and reading a good blog or webpage can never be replaced IMO.

Mark

[Hazo]

I'd like someone to explain to me why it's so good. I know it has its advantages for keeping ppl up to date. But saying 'going to the shops' is a waste of time. If you really wanted you can use FaceBook for that anyway, so what's so good about it?

Nick

[JohnH]

You can set up twitter to send a text to your phone when your friends update stuff.. Like if you are out at night and you twitter "going to Shoko in 10 minutes, meet me there if you want" all of your friends get that on their phones and can meet you there.

That's kind of a real life example... people can also summarize cool articles and then provide a link. Kinda like recommendations... Like how the top stumblers have fans who frequently check back to see what sites they have discovered and/or recommend.

It's a new form of social media. Because you are limited to 140 characters it keeps everything short and to the point. It's really a unique way of communicating.. I like to think of it as "facebook lite".

Kevin Rose of Digg.com has 70k+ followers. That's 70k people who like what he has to say and will read any article he links to in a post.

Notice that he also only follows around 115 people. The point is not to follow a ton of people, otherwise you are swamped with irrelevant text messages all the time. Only follow your friends (people you care about keeping up with or hearing from).

I just like when I am bored I get a text message that links to a blog post that I can read and enjoy.

[JohnH]

And as far as the blog topic... blogs will still be blogs, but in more of a website kind of way. There is no substitute for a full page of content.

However, RSS has never really caught on as the next big thing. Email will always trump RSS. Twitter will eventually be more efficient at reaching your audience than RSS because twitter is kinda like RSS for dummies in a way. I feel like more people know what twitter is already than what an rss feed is.

I guess I will rephrase, Twitter or "twitter-like" technology will replace rss eventually.

[themike537]

Regarding Facebook, it may be really tough to make money through poker affiliating, but there's a lot of people making serious money through other forms of affiliating on Facebook.

Beanie is spot on when it comes to making money through the social features (spamming friends, auto friend-adders, etc), but it's wrong to say you can't make money at all on Facebook, because their advertising system rocks for targeting specific niches with your ads.

[Hazo]

Thanks for the overview John, much appreciated.

Nick