Now according to the FTC’s guidelines, all celebrities promoting a product or service on social media networks like Instagram need to be disclosed. For the best online reputation management companies, this means that there will no longer be consumers who are pissed off if a product doesn’t work to their liking after buying it due to a ‘fake’ celebrity endorsement. Social media posts have been tricking consumers all along to thinking they’re completely unbiased and that the product actually works and is amazing when its not. Let’s be honest here, if a celebrity is promoting a fat burning product, they can afford plastic surgery’s and basically any surgery therefore obviously the product isn’t legitimate.
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Although it isn’t just celebrities faults that a product doesn’t work the way it is supposed to, I mean the company produced a crappy product in the first place and the consumer ended up purchasing it anyways. After looking at the top 50 Instagram posts each month, the marketing firm Mediakix found that 32 per cent of the top 50 celebrities ran sponsored content and of that group, 93 per cent of them didn’t even meet the FTC guidelines. Now they are becoming stricter and celebrity endorsements will not be as common as before since it wont be worth it to companies since they cant trick their target market anymore.
When it comes to the exact FTC guidelines, these include a clear disclosure like #ad or #sponsored. You are not allowed to hide the disclosure either therefore you need to put the hashtag right at the beginning of the rest of the other hashtags. The celebrities aren’t allowed to use #partner either since that doesn’t tell you anything and they are also not allowed to just tag the sponsor in the post rather than hashtaging or clearly stating it is an ad and a celebrity endorsement.