As you know, influencers must disclose that they are receiving benefits from brands in exchange for their services, per Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations. As we saw this year, the FTC has begun to whack not only brands for failure to insist on influencer disclosure, but also has acted against influencers themselves (PRN, September 12, 2017).
From a brand perspective, the fear was that having influencers add disclosure notices to their posts would damage their and the post’s credibility with fans. The charts on the right side of this page seem to say otherwise, at least for influencers in the beauty space.
When 1,000 of the world’s leading beauty influencers affixed the hashtags #AD and #SPON to their content, not only did mentions of their posts grow 54% year over year, but engagement quadrupled (see middle chart). The blue bar indicates mentions and engagement from January through September 2017, the purple bar shows mentions and engagements from January through September 2016. The charts are from Global Influencer Marketing: Insights from Beauty, released December 5 by Traackr and Talk PR.
The bottom table also tips a sacred cow: people go on social media to complain about bad service. French data firm Digimind looked at social mentions of airlines during the Thanksgiving period (November 19-26). As you can see on the lower chart, airlines had more positive than negative social mentions. In addition, the most talked-about feature was positive service, besting timeliness and comfort. The takeaway is conventional: brands, regardless of industry, should monitor the social conversation.
