12 Ways to Make Money with Social Media

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Today, there are more opportunities than ever to make money with social media and make money online. You can make money with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks.

Here are 12 ways to make money with social media that you may not have thought of.

1. Promote your own products and services through social media

Of course, if you have your own products and services, you’ll want to promote them first. And social media is a great way to get exposure to your products.

2. Promote other people’s products as an affiliate

If you don’t have your own products, become an affiliate and make commissions selling other people’s products. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online.

Even if you have your own products and services, selling related affiliate products to your audience is a great way to make additional money.

Find great affiliate products in your niche. Join their affiliate programs, promote their products on social media, and make commissions when selling them through your links.

If you sell digital products like ebooks, online courses, and software, you can make commissions of up to 75% of the sale. Typical commissions on digital products range from 25% to 50%. Physical products pay a much lower percentage.

Some programs even pay you for clicks and for giving away something for free.

Because affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online, I recommend reading some of my articles about affiliate marketing.

3. Promote other people’s brands or products

One of the most common ways to make money with social media is by promoting other people’s brands or products.

Websites like Tribegroup and Takumi make this easy.

Tribegroup classifies an Influencer as “someone with 3,000+ genuine followers on one of our three partner platforms: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.”

Brands create campaign briefs indicating what kind of post they are looking for. From a brief, influencers create and submit a post (on Twitter, Facebook, or Instragram), set their price, and submit it for approval to the brand. If a brand approves it, the influencer can then publish it to their social media and collect payment.

Takumi (Instagram) Influencers must have 1,000+ Instagram followers. You choose the brands you want to work with. You post original content to your followers and get paid directly to your bank account. Payments are cleared into your account  two working days after posting.

4. Get paid to send other people’s messages to your followers

Fiverr has many gigs of people who will charge you to send your tweets to their followers.

5. Get paid to set up and manage other people’s social media accounts

I think that this is one of the best ways to make money from social media. People will pay you good money to set up, manage and build their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other accounts.

  • Setting up, managing and scheduling Pinterest and Instagram accounts is a big money maker today.
  • People pay good money to create pins, pin, repin and schedule pins.
  • People pay for setting up their social media account and profiles, writing content, writing posts, posting tweets, growing followers and more.
  • Many people profit from creating social images such as creating profile images, Facebook cover design, designing logos, banners, image posts, Pinterest and Instagram images. Others create content.

Read more here: How to become a freelance social media manager.
The best freelance jobs sites to promote your services.

Check out these Pinterest resources:

  • Tailwind – The best scheduling tool for Pinterest. They have an Instagram version too (but I haven’t tried Tailwind for Instagram yet). Read my Tailwind review here.

6. Create images for social media

There is a huge need for social media images. And many people make money by creating social images such as Pinterest pins, Instagram images, Twitter images, profile images, Facebook cover design, and more.

Bloggers, affiliates, merchants, and anyone promoting on Pinterest want good-looking pins that stand out from other people’s pins. They must have good-looking images to be successful with Pinterest. They typically want to have 3 to 6 pins for each blog post and there is a huge demand for Pinterest pin designs.

Many people are selling designs of social media images on Fiverr and other freelance sites. And you can too!

Graphic resources:

  • Photoshop is the most powerful but more complex program. But for creating Pinterest and Instagram images, it’s so much easier for beginners to use Canva or PicMonkey.
  • Canva is probably the easiest tool to create compelling Pinterest images and other social media images for people who don’t have a graphics background.
  • PicMonkey is a popular and easy-to-use graphics program many people use to create Pinterest and other social media images. It’s easy to add text and graphics to images + it includes a wide range of editing tools that are easy to use. Check it out! Sign up for your free trial today!
  • Find my listing of free stock images here.
  • To get unique images for your blog and social media that will help you stand out, I recommend DepositPhotos. Their photos are very affordable at about $1 per photo.

7. Sell social media tools

There is a lot of software that can help you with automating and managing your social media promotions.

Social media management tools are very popular.  Many social media tools have affiliate programs and will pay you commissions when selling their software through your affiliate link.

For example, I’m using  SocialPilot or scheduling my Twitter and Facebook posts. I love the program, became an affiliate after using the program for a while and liking it, wrote a review, and am promoting it on multiple social media. You can read my review of SocialPilot here.

Another great tool I’m using and promoting as an affiliate is Tailwind. Tailwind is the absolute best software to schedule and manage Pinterest.

Check my review of TailWind here, a social media management tool I’m using to schedule and manage my Pinterest marketing.

Try Tailwind with the free Tailwind trial.

8. Sell social media how-to information (books, courses)

How-to courses, books, seminars, methods, scheduling templates, image templates, checklists, and planners to help people make money with social media sell well.

Check out this planner bundle to help you plan your social media, your marketing, and your newsletters.

Here’s a good book on how to boost your Pinterest results. Check out Ana’s She Approach to Pinterest!

Do you want to learn how to create click-worthy pins? If you want to learn or improve your Pinterest pin design, check out Nadalie's Next level Pin Designs Course. This is a great pin design course that teaches you exactly how to design your own unique “click-worthy” pins. And you can do the design FREE in Canva. Check out Nadalie's course here.

9. Promote and showcase your arts and crafts with image posts

Send your followers to Etsy, your blog, and other places where you’re selling your arts, crafts, printables, and more. 

10. Get paid to generate leads for other people

You can get paid to generate leads for other people. Leads are potential customers who have shown some interest in specific products or services and have provided contact information that can be used to follow up with more information.

You’ve probably seen websites that generate leads for car insurance, health insurance, and more.

Lead generation is a great way to make money from your blog or social media. This is especially true if you generate leads for financial services.

For example, mortgage and refinance leads are especially good as they can bring in tiered commissions. You will get your first commission when you generate the initial lead – which simply involves getting someone to fill out a free form; this lead can earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. If your lead then refinances his or her home with the company you're promoting, you could earn several hundreds or several thousands of dollars. How you're getting paid for lead generation will vary of course depending on which company or product you're promoting.

You can generate leads by sharing a link (tweet, Pinterest pin, etc.) to a landing page where visitors provide their contact information before gaining access to your related content.

Other ways to generate leads include running contests, paid social media advertising, landing pages, run paid social media advertising (e.g. Facebook ads) leading to a landing page, host a webinar, and more.

11. Create and sell social video tutorials

Make tutorials about anything that is related to how to use social media and how to make money with social media.

For example, create a video on how to automate social media scheduling.

12. Make money with Instagram

Do sponsored posts for brands that want to get in front of your audience. Some companies pay a lot of money (up to thousands per post) to Instagrammers.  You need a minimum of 1000 followers, but having an engaged following is more important than the number of followers you have to get paid by companies to promote them on Instagram.

13. Make money with Youtube

To make money on YouTube, you need to join the YouTube Partner Program. Eligible creators can earn money from advertisements served on their videos, from YouTube Premium subscribers watching their content, and in some cases, through viewer-purchased goods like Super Chat, Merch, and channel memberships.

Learn more about the YouTube programs and Eligibility at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851

You can monetize your YouTube content with AdSense and make plenty of money from your social media expertise. This is time-consuming and you must have a lot of views to make this profitable.

14. Make money from sponsored posts

Get paid to promote products and services for other businesses. You can sign up with companies that will pay you for access to your social media.

Get paid for tweeting. Charge businesses for your tweets. For example, Sponsored Tweets is an ad service for Twitter that allows you to set your own price-per-click for ads that you tweet.  At Sponsored Tweets, you can find sponsors that will pay you to Tweet about their products for a fee. You can choose the ads you tweet from a list of available ads that are updated regularly.  You must have at least 50 followers, 100 tweets, and an account that is at least 60 days old to sign up for this service.

Ad.ly is an ad service that lets you send out advertisements in your tweets. You create a profile of your interests, then advertisers can choose your account to publicize a campaign. You have to send out a specific number of tweets on a specific schedule, and you get paid a lump sum.

Some social media tips

  • Don’t provide sales messages only.
  • Add value. Provide quality info.
  • Offer something your audience is genuinely interested in.
  • Provide a mix of valuable content and sales messages. When you consistently provide useful and entertaining content and interact with people, you will get noticed and start making money from social media marketing.  Answer questions quickly.
  • Be social. Interact with people, reach out to other people in your niche, like their posts, comment, and share, and they’ll likely do the same.

You will need to have a decent amount of followers to make money on social media and put in a good amount of work but there are plenty of ways to make money with social media.

Try one or more of the methods above to make money with social media. You can maximize your profits by using more than one social media.

Social Media Articles 

SOCIAL MEDIA RESOURCES

  • Check out this planner bundle to help you plan your social media, your marketing, and your newsletters.
  • Graphic design software: Canva, PicMonkey, and Photoshop.
  • The Best Free Stock Photos and Images.
  • Tailwind – The best scheduling tool for Pinterest. They have an Instagram version too (but I haven’t tried Tailwind for Instagram yet). Read my Tailwind review here.
  • Hootsuite – Automates scheduling for several social media (I used to use it but switched to using SocialPilot). You can read my Hootsuite review here.
  • SmarterQueue – An all-in-one social media management tool that boosts engagement and lets you curate, schedule, listen, reply, and analyze in one place (SmarterQueue comes highly recommended by experts).
  • SocialPilot – Automates scheduling for a wide range of social media (I’m using it for Twitter and Facebook scheduling). You can read my review of Social Pilot here.
  • Tasty Pins plugin –  WordPress plugin that hides and optimizes Pinterest images in your blog posts.