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Amazon Associates hasn’t always played nice with social media. Rather, it has NEVER played nice with social media, at least publicly.
You might remember a couple months ago when Joshua from SearchEngineJournal posted about Amazon denying commissions from sales coming from Twitter. Amazon, citing their Associates Agreement, stated that affiliates could only make commission on referrals that originate from “your site”. The debate about whether a user “owns” their Twitter domain ensued, and Amazon continued to hang its affiliates out to dry on this policy…until today.
Today, Amazon Associates announced the integration of Twitter with the Amazon Site Stripe, which includes 2-click posting of links to specific products on Twitter (once logged into Twitter), including URL shortening via bit.ly. Amazon also posted a Social Media FAQ for Amazon Associates which lays out its new policies with decent clarity.
Some users have reported that the “Share on Twitter” functionality is intermittently not including the affiliate tracking ID in the shortened URL, so be sure to test your links!
After a quick test, it appears that Twitter randomly chooses a “Just saw this on Amazon” or “Check this out” message, along with the shortened bit.ly link. Here’s what it looks like:
To summarize, Amazon’s Social Media Policies are as follows:
- URL Shorteners: You may now post links via URL shortening services, as long as page does not get framed by the service. If the address bar shows Amazon.com, you’re probably okay.
- Twitter: You may now post shortened links via Twitter.
- Social Media Usernames: Your social media username may NOT contain any Amazon copyrighted terms like “amazon” or “kindle”.
- Product Advertising API: You may use the Product Advertising API on social media properties, however, they must still abide by the previously established Product Advertising API Policies (which bar the use of the API on mobile devices!)
- How to Best Use Social Media: Amazon ain’t gonna tell you! Why they had to include that in the FAQ, I don’t know (see question #6 here)
All in all, I’d say this is a good step for Amazon. I know that personally, it will alleviate many hassles for me in getting around Amazon’s formerly nay-saying social media policy (let’s just say that all URL shorteners aren’t equal…especially when you build your own and use “fancy” META tags).
Kudos to Amazon for addressing this issue in a less-than-outrageous amount of time.
