Influencer Branded Content Disclaimers on Social Media

If you work on influencer marketing you should know all about branded content disclaimers on social media and the FTC. If you don’t, here’s a brief overview of their guidelines. The FTC endorsement guidelines were put into effect in order to protect consumers from deceptive marketing (false advertising) and have been adjusted over time as they’ve seen the need. You can read all about their endorsement guidelines, though be warned you may need a few cups of coffee to get through them.

Recently there has been more and more news about the FTC calling out brand partnerships that don’t meet their guidelines, most talked about was the letters sent to Instagram influencers.  Due to this rise in FTC involvement, some of the social networks have adjusted their platforms. Two of those networks have helped make influencer disclosures up front and clear in regards brand partnerships.

Facebook

In April of this year, Facebook announced the release of their tool to help make a brand partnership clear and up front. This update allows for publishers and influencers to tag a marketer in a branded content post, as well as marking the post as ‘paid’ to help avoid any confusion. Not only does this help influencers adhere to FTC requirements it also helps the marketer. By tagging the marketer it allows them access to insights and provides them with the option of sharing and boosting the post.

While the tool was initially only available to verified accounts, non-verified pages (if they don’t have access) are able to submit an application to receive access to the branded content tool.

Instagram

It’s no surprise that in addition to Facebook adding a tool to help with influencer marketing disclosure, Instagram was next. Similar to the way Facebook’s tool works, it shows the disclosure up front whether you are doing a standalone post or a story.

While these tools help with disclosing the relationship between the influencer and the brand, we’d still recommend keeping the #sponsored or #ad disclosures as well. Better to be on the safe side with the FTC and with networks like Pinterest and Twitter that haven’t adopted tools to integrate branded content, be sure to use the appropriate disclaimers. If you’d like help with keeping your influencers compliant or have questions about disclosing on social networks, we’d love to help!