Last may, Facebook began to implement on fan pages a tab named “info and ads” which exposes to any user the ad campaigns active at the moment by each company.
This update marks the skew Facebook is taking towards transparency in publicity for the audience after the enormous controversy lived last year on user personal data usage.
This new option will give us the opportunity to be up to date with whatever our competition is doing at any time, when their page was created and any changes in the name of the page throughout its history.
CMA! Transform and Roll Out!
The CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) has begun an investigation about influencer marketing to collect information that will let them know if what influencers are posting on social media is organic content or paid.
To this end, the CMA has been in communication with many influencers to study the inner workings of their accounts and paid posts, because this kind of marketing keeps growing more and more within social media marketing a law was implemented in 2008, to protect the user all paid content must be properly labeled and clearly identifiable by the consumer.
Shortcuts in the industry?
It looks like the CMA already has identified many examples of paid posts that are not properly labeled as such, which has been very obvious for the users since forever. Many influencers have tried to post paid content as if it was organic and, honestly, more often than not it’s excruciatingly obvious. We have the big mistake made by Hershey’s Mexico this past month in which the influencer posts were obviously paid by the brand and yet they lacked the “sponsored” tag, so the reactions were highly negative to this terrible ad campaign promoted by the chocolate factory.
Growth can lead to vice
Investment on influencer marketing has been growing very fast and, like most things that grow fast in the digital world, it become easily exploitable. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat scams are lurking around every corner and the only way to avoid them is to open our eyes really wide. This day, there are many influencers out there that are fake and one must sit down and do the research before we can choose to pay a so-called influencer to promote our brand to avoid having a public relational nightmare that stalks every brand in this day and age. If anything, this should serve as a cautionary tale on the way we as researchers for social media should do, which is: never let our guard down.
Sources
www.facebook.com
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.marketingweek.com
www.instagram.com