According to the latest investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, Instagram has promised to do more to safeguard consumers by making sure that influencers state commercial relationships within their posts. Instagram influencers are required to mention commercial arrangements by tagging within posts with #sponsored or #ad. But many don’t do this as found by CMA so, in order to avoid any legal action for Instagram, the company has promised to enhance its action on sponsored posts.

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Instagram’s Plans To Counter The Issue

• Firstly, Instagram is going to add a new prompt that will need influencers confirmation if they have received incentives to promote a service or product before they publish their post.
• Instagram is also working on developing new algorithms to find potential advertising content. So that it can then alert the relevant business to inform them about platform rules.

Instagram has been working on this concern of proper disclosure in influencer marketing for years. The company introduced an option to tag a business partner in your post back in 2017, so as to get more clarity around such.

But still many users failed to comply with the rules and even if users still added the relevant tags most of them failed to meet the regulatory requirements. In a recent study, it has been observed that more than three-quarters of the influencer promotions on Instagram don’t show the #sponsored or #ad disclosure along with the main option, which means that users need to extend the text for the disclosure to be seen. As per the regulations, Influencer marketing labels must be popular enough that consumers notice them with ease, and hiding them may still be in violation of the official rules and may come under scrutiny.

Conclusion

All the brand/influencer partnerships, in every region, are required to use the partner tag and where Instagram finally moving towards. But as of now, the company is moving towards releasing increased disclosure tools over the next year and it is still not yet clear if all the measures will apply in all the regions. So, if you run influencer promotions then it is worth strengthening your process and making sure you are providing clarity on the partnerships ahead of the new push.