FTC Guidelines for Influencer Marketers

So you’ve been asked by a brand to help them promote their product? Congrats! You’ve got a fun and exciting job to fill. I mean, let’s be honest, you’re THE newest face of the brand!

When you work with VizSense, we personally ensure all of our campaigns are FTC compliant, but we think that these guidelines are important for all influencer marketers to know. So for quick reference, we’ve dug through the FTC guidelines for influencers and pulled out the main points to help ensure your posts can stay on the right side of the law and steer your Instagram clear of any trouble.

What is the FTC?

A quick reminder from that high school civics class you took years ago, the FTC is the governing body that regulates advertising and attempts to protect consumers from misleading business practices.

What exactly does this mean for influencers though, and why should influencers care about the FTC?

To start, as an influencer you have now become an advertiser and are subjected to the rules and guidelines of the Federal Trade Commission like any other brand, agency, or partner. Pretty cool to know that your work is so impactful that it includes you among the biggest forms of advertising.

The FTC has been working hard on defining these guidelines for the industry and have boiled it down to one main point: transparency!

As an influencer, you are solely responsible for ensuring your content complies with the FTC guidelines. This means that to ensure a brand is not being deceptive in their promotions and advertisements, you must disclose any brand partnerships and relationships while endorsing their product on social media, or you, the brand or agency partner could be hit with some hefty fines.rand or agency partner could be hit with some hefty fines.

So, When Is It Necessary For An Influencer To Disclose a Brand Partnership?

Of course, if a brand pays you for a post, this would need to be disclosed to your followers. But there are other types of relationships with a brand that are not as obvious or clear cut.

The FTC defines a relationship with a brand to be when you have any financial, employment, personal, or family relationship.

But How Should I Disclose A Brand Partnership?

Now that we’ve cleared up when you need to disclose a partnership, we can dive into how.

Here Are The FTC Disclosure Basics:

1. Disclosure placement should be hard to miss
2. Disclosure language should be simple and clear
3. If you have no business relationship with a product or business that you’re promoting, you don’t have to disclose.

We have outlined exactly how you can disclose your partnerships on each platform in the below infographic. You can share this graphic with other content creators easily by downloading it here:

What About the Instagram Branded Content Tool?

You know, this one?

As convenient as the Instagram Branded Content Tool is, it is important to point out that this does not qualify as an acceptable disclosure under the FTC.

Specifically, the FTC says: “Don’t assume that a platform’s disclosure tool is good enough, but consider using it in addition to your own, good disclosure”.

That didn’t stop Instagram from pushing creators to use the branded content tag, though:

In the past, it has not always been possible to get approval access from brands for branded content, especially with larger companies where their social media may be run by a whole different agency.

The good news is, Instagram recently made an update to their Branded Content Tool so you can tag your post as sponsored before the brand accepts your partner request.

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Okay, Cool. But, Short Form Video Content Is Kinda Taking Over My Life Now. What Are the FTC Guidelines For TikTok and Reels Then?

Same. And this is where things can get a bit foggy. Some platforms and content, like Instagram Posts and Stories, have pretty Black and White guidelines defined by the FTC, while newer forms of content, like TikTok and Reels, are not as well defined.

With TikTok specifically, we recommend you use #Ad in your caption, as well as a superimposed pop up on top of your video disclosing the partnership within the first 15 seconds of your video -- like you would on an Instagram Story -- just to be safe.

Since you can easily download TikTok videos and share them on other platforms without the original caption, we recommend doing both to cover all your bases.

In Conclusion

We’re sure the FTC is working hard to navigate emerging platforms like TikTok, and we’ll update this post as soon as they come out in full force with new guidelines.