Please be aware that to make your post or content fully compliant, you may need to have additional disclosures such as hashtags #ad, for example. Please refer to relative regulation documentation to find out what other requirements you have to meet in addition to compliance-links to make sure that your whole post is compliant and you are legally safe.
How influencers can stay compliant?
Do you publish sponsored links? Have you been paid by a company to tout the product?
If you work with brands to recommend or endorse products, you need to comply with the law when making recommendations.
The FTC uses a very simple principle when monitoring paid influencer social media promotions:
Advertising should be truthful and not misleading. Your ”material connection” with the brand is better to be disclosed according to new guides. Consumers should be able to notice the disclosure easily.
When to disclose?
- Disclose when you have any financial, employment, personal, or family relationship with a brand.
- Financial relationships aren’t limited to money. Disclose the relationship if you got anything of value to mention a product.
- If a brand gives you free or discounted products or other perks and then you mention one of its products, make a disclosure even if you weren’t asked to mention that product.
- Don’t assume your followers already know about your brand relationships.
- Make disclosures even if you think your evaluations are unbiased.
- Keep in mind that tags, likes, pins, and similar ways of showing you like a brand or product are endorsements.
- If posting from abroad, U.S. law applies if it’s reasonably foreseeable that the post will affect U.S. consumers. Foreign laws might also apply.
- If you have no brand relationship and are just telling people about a product you bought and happen to like, you don’t need to declare that you don’t have a brand relationship.
How to stay on the right side of the law?
- Create a Short Regulatory Compliant link
- Enable the Wowpage with FTC disclosure