18 Sep Influencer Restrictions Are Here To Stay – Social You Should Know
While Microsoft and Google bet on influencers, the FTC clamps down on influencer marketing; and LinkedIn hedges bets on new audience network… in this week’s edition of Social You Should Know.
Influencer restrictions are here to stay.
Last week the FTC released updated guidelines for how Influencers should tread disclosing paid posts. The FTC is not kidding around as they have recently brought complaint against 2 people for failing to disclose their relationship to an online, first-person shooter game.
According to the FTC website, an initial round of warnings were sent back in April to influencers whose posts were not compliant. Another round of recent letters specifically asks if the influencer to identify any connections they have to the brand.
Lastly, in case you missed it, the FTC summed up their guidelines in 4 recommendations:
- Clearly disclose when you have a financial or family relationship with a brand
- Don’t assume that using a platform’s disclosure tool is sufficient
- Avoid ambiguous disclosures like #thanks, #collab, #sp, #spon or #ambassador.
- Don’t rely on a disclosure placed after a CLICK MORE link or in another easy-to-miss location
The proof is in the Patent.
As the FTC gears up to protect American’s from untrustworthy “influencers”, Microsoft and Google are hedging their bets on patents that gather insights and give access to trendsetters. Specifically, Google wants to be able to find and reward early adopters of content that goes viral. While Microsoft will focus on classifying and scoring influencers based on their online activity. Influencer marketing is increasingly growing across many market segments. The race is on for figuring out how to competitively reward them for creating or identifying great content. What all this means to marketers remains to be seen.
LinkedIn Launches Audience Network
Following in Facebook’s and Google’s footsteps, on Sept 6, LinkedIn launched their own Audience Network for advertisers to buy inventory on a network of mobile sites and apps while still leveraging their demographic data for Sponsored Content. The network will cover ‘tens of thousands’ of sites/apps globally (MSN, Outlook, MyFitnessPal). The LinkedIn Audience Network is rolling out globally to all English-speaking countries first and follows a limited beta in which 6,000 LinkedIn advertisers participated. According to LinkedIn, beta users saw between 3-13% more unique impressions and up to 80% more unique clicks.
