One of the FTC’s main concerns is that consumers may be misguided into believing that an endorsement is the honest opinion of an endorser when in actuality there is a relationship between an endorser and a company and/or marketer. If relationship exists or an agreement has been made, the FTC requires that the endorser disclose this information.

In some forms of social media such as Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, there is a limited amount of space in which one can post something, which makes disclosing this information more difficult. Further, the FTC has not mandated the specific wording of disclosures. However, it advises that inserting short statements such as “#sponsored”, “#promotion”, “paid ad” or even “ad,” may be enough to disclose a connection between the endorser and company.

Thus, while it certainly takes away from their organic publicity, companies should make an effort to advise their endorsers that they must disclose their relationship or if they received a particular item from the company or its marketing firm. Particular hash-tags such as “#sponsored” can be used, or even perhaps much more obvious hash-tags such as “ProvidedToMeBy[insertcompanyname]forfree”.

As a company, here are some best-practice suggestions to use when delving into social media if you would like to avoid possible attention from the FTC:

1. Educate and instruct endorsers of the guidelines above.
2. Make periodic attempts to search for what is said and if there is a problem, follow-up on it.
3. Make a concerted effort to expressly communicate to endorsers that they must adequately disclose the relationship to consumers.
4. Monitor posts.
5. If you re-tweet, re-gram, or re-pin an endorsed post, you need to also disclose the relationship.