It’s been well documented that you cannot promote eBay listings on social networks.. or any site you do not currently own. Meaning, you can post rover links on Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc. It has been the general understanding that you can use those social networks to promote your OWN site where you’d have rover links on them.

Today, I noticed a very disturbing post on the EPN forum by mrguyhp where a affiliate had their account suspended, then reinstated, but withe following warning from EPN:

We have completed the investigation of your account and decided to unsuspend it. It is now active again. However, please be advised that as of August 20, 2009 publishers are no longer allowed to post on twitter.com or any other social network (facebook.com), even if they are merely sending traffic to their own sites. Please remove all your links on these sites and stop those campaigns. If you continue to receive traffic from these sites, your account will be expired and all your pending commissions will be reversed

Now, this makes no sense! According to their EPN blog “10 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Strategy” they have the following listed:

Although eBay Partner Network does not allow our partners to directly promote eBay through social media arenas, we want to make sure you know that you can drive traffic to your own website(s) through appropriate social media strategies.

These two statements seem to be opposite. So far no word from the ‘pinks’ on the subject. You can follow the entire thread here.

UPDATE

Looks like we have a pink reply on the post!

Hi everyone,

To clarify our policy allows social network traffic to be sent to your own site, just not directly to eBay. The blog post is correct. We are looking into the context of that response from Network Quality.

Thanks,
Casey

So hopefully, this is all cleared up now.