5 Things You're Getting Wrong About Social Media

New research suggests that heavy social media use might be correlated to lower self-control, which marketing experts believe could lead to higher spending. "Ultimately, the way you counteract this is by raising your self-awareness,” Columbia University Professor Keith Wilcox told TODAY. “It's not about don't spend time on Facebook, but just be aware of what it might be doing to you."

The world of affiliate marketing can be full of confusion and misinformation, especially where social media is concerned. That's why we've brought together some key facts that, if you take them on board, will help you to build your affiliate marketing website's popularity. Take a look below at the five things most people get wrong when it comes to using social media to build a website's reputation.

"Social media doesn't matter for SEO, Matt Cutts said so."

Google's SEO guru Matt Cutts posted a video in 2014 that was intended to clear up some misconceptions, but instead muddied the waters for many SEO-watchers. Essentially, he said that Google did not specifically trawl the likes of Facebook and Twitter for information that would affect the search ranking for a site.

What he did NOT say was "Facebook and Twitter aren't useful for SEO". It's a complex nuance, but publishers who are serious about building an online following should be promoting their work on both social media and also through other marketing avenues.

Google, Cutts said, still looks at things that happen on Facebook and Twitter (as well as other social media) in the same way as it does any other website; if the information is public, and is seen by Google's algorithm as useful for search listings, it is counted.

What is clear is that social media is not given preferential treatment by Google, but as this post on the Kissmetrics blog points out, such actions as backlinking in social media still affect Google rankings in the same way they would anywhere else on the web.

"Social media should come after traditional marketing."

If you live in the UK, you've perhaps seen Lord Sugar on the TV show The Apprentice, barking at his candidates that unless they can sell a mop and bucket on the streets, they're no use to him as a business partner. The thing is, Lord Sugar is wrong, and outdated in his thinking - and copying him when it comes to marketing could be disastrous for your business.

A lot of small businesses focus on getting word-of-mouth coverage for their products before establishing a social media presence. But in the modern world, where does most of the word-of-mouth coverage actually happen? Through social media shares.

Although Facebook is increasingly irritating to a large number of its own users, a leading reason for not quitting the social networking site is the fear of missing out on events, as this article on Business Insider wittily explains.

As we've said before, email newsletters are great - in fact, they're an essential building-block in any website marketing strategy, because email is a universal, shared, medium these days. However, Facebook is another string to your bow, and the ease of sharing your posts means that, get the content right, and you will reach people who hadn't known about you.

"Twitter is a waste of time."

There are a lot of people who insist that they won't bother to use Twitter, because it's full of spam, idiotic messages, and abuse. However, like the rest of social media, Twitter's usefulness to you as an affiliate marketing business depends directly on HOW you use it.

Follow the right people (people you admire or in whose experiences you are interested, from your line of work), be open and friendly in how you tweet, and make sure your tweets are a conversation rather than a monologue (people love questions when they're relevant to your business), and you're onto a winner with Twitter.

This is explained very well in Aaron Lee's recent blog post, in which he also makes the excellent point that Twitter is the perfect place for promotions - and affiliate marketing is all about taking advantage of those.

"I don't need to work at building a following on social media. I can just buy followers."

There are businesses around the world that specialize in selling likes and follows on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the other major social networks. However, you shouldn't fall into the trap of using those businesses, especially if you're serious about being successful in affiliate marketing.

As this article from Elizabeth Fein explains perfectly, if you buy supporters on social media, you're not actually using the sites to grow your business. You're just lazily assuming that numbers mean everything. Social media is all about the level, and intensity, of engagement that people have with your business and what you are selling. You can't buy that.

"Social media takes up too much time. Time is money and I'm wasting it."

In the end, you should think of social media marketing as you would a burrito. It's wrapped up and can't easily be mixed with other sources (sauces?), but it's easily-accessible, tasty, fun, and incredibly popular. Like the ubiquitous Mexican snack, people can also take social media on-the-go. If you want to have your affiliate marketing in the palm of every hand, you need to be on social media.

Just like making that burrito, social media is fast, and actually gets easier to master, the more effort you make to understand how it works. Spend some quality time brushing up your social media pages, and you'll feel the benefit for your affiliate marketing business.

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