Legal Rules for Social Media Influencer Marketing
Social media influencers and sponsored posts on social media are everywhere you look. Social media influencer marketing has become a mainstream and important marketing channel for brands to connect with consumers on social media platforms as well as a way for influencers to earn additional income. However, many social media influencers aren’t aware of the legal requirements that apply to their endorsements. Here is an overview of the basic legal rules for social media influencer marketing.
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER MARKETING?
Social media influencers are individuals who work with brands to recommend or endorse products through the individual’s social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and others. Typically, the individual will receive compensation or complimentary products in exchange for their endorsement or recommendation of those products on their social media accounts.
WHAT LEGAL RULES APPLY TO SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER MARKETING?
Like traditional forms of advertising, social media influencer marketing is governed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which works to stop deceptive advertising. With social media influencers, there is a risk of engaging in deceptive advertising if the audience doesn’t know that the influencer is being compensated for her/his endorsement of the product and instead thinks that the influencer is making the endorsement based entirely on their own product usage and opinion and without being compensated to do so.
Thus, when social media influencers endorse a product through social media, they have a legal obligation to make it obvious that they have have a relationship with the brand. This disclosure obligation applies when the influencer has any “material relationship” to the brand, including a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship (which includes both money or anything else of value, such as complimentary products). If you do not have a “material relationship” with the brand and are just telling people about a product that you bought and happen to like, you don’t need to many any disclosure because there isn’t anything to disclose.
If disclosure is required, you must make sure that people will see and understand the disclosure, that its hard for them to miss, and that the disclosure is in clear and simple language. You can’t “bury” the disclosure in the fine print. The disclosure should be placed in the endorsement message itself and not in the “about me” page, profile page, or a place that the user must click “more” to access. If the endorsement is in a photo or video platform, the disclosure should be in the photo or video itself. If the endorsement is in a live stream, the disclosure should be repeated periodically so that viewers who only see a part of the live stream will get the disclosure.
Other than the obligation to disclose, here are a few other tips to keep in mind:
You can’t endorse a product that you haven’t actually tried;
If you are compensated to endorse a product that is bad, you can’t say it is good;
You can’t make up claims about the product that would require proof that you don’t have, such as scientific proof that the product can treat a health condition.