One of the great things about Twitter is how easy it is to Follow new people and for those people to Follow you back. Within a few minutes you can lay the basic communication groundwork for a new business relationship. For affiliate marketing this is a great situation—good for digital marketing, lead generation, list building, and all kinds of advantages for an affiliate network.

The drawback to how easy it is to Follow or be Followed on Twitter is that it’s just as easy to be UnFollowed, meaning your list will shrink. A lot of that has to do with Twitter etiquette and how you use your Twitter account. As an affiliate marketing person trying out new digital marketing techniques, seeing what works and what doesn’t is both interesting from a social media marketing perspective and vital from a business perspective.

If you are in the affiliate marketing business, you want Followers. If you are in any business or marketing anything, you want Followers. Once you have those Followers, here is how you UnFollowed:”

1. Don’t OverTweet
Yes, you want to get your digital marketing message out there on Twitter. Yes, a key aspect of Affiliate marketing is getting your marketing message out to as many people as you can. The key is to do that– without overdoing it. If you start to be one of those users who puts out 100 tweets a day, you will be UnFollowed fast. If you schedule 10 tweets to go out at once, effectively flooding the streams of your Followers, you can expect to be rinsed down the drain by the Followers who are paying attention—and those are the ones you want to keep!

2. Be Human, In a Professional Way…
Some users tend to treat their Twitter account either like an RSS feed or like a Instant Messenger account. It’s neither—those both exist already!  Using Twitter to put out a new blog post about affiliate marketing or to talk with the people in your affiliate marketing network about an upcoming conference isn’t bad, but using Twitter solely for either one of those purposes is. If all you do is put out blog posts or new products on your Twitter account, you will start losing Followers. If all you do is chatter away about what you’re getting for lunch, you’ll lose even more. Mix those two in with a whole lot of tweets that “add value” and RT some other great users—now that’s being human, in a professional way….

3. Avoid Doubing Up
Specifically, don’t link your Facebook Status updates to your Tweets. Why not? Overdoing it. Again, as an affiliate marketer or affiliate program management team you want your message out to as many people as possible, but you also want to keep that message fresh. If you are dropping the same messages on the two most popular social media channels you will get stale and possibly annoying very quickly- and that means UnFollowed. Keep it fresh and keep it separate when it comes to updates on Facebook or Twitter.