Social media marketing helps small businesses to connect, communicate and engage more and more customers with your brand. Incorporating social media into marketing campaigns has hence invited legal risks and actions against brands than on individual posting for his personal purpose. As it is becoming essential to the marketing strategies of all the businesses, whether big or small, it is attached with more of rules and regulations to safeguard customers from fake and false representation. With some of very common reasons which are putting brands into trouble, we bring to you the social media issues and ways to stay away from them.
Moreover the suggested rule for this issue is “To use only those things that are owned by you”. As the creator owns all the rights, you can either create the desired thing of your own like clicking a picture or shooting a video or you can get these things done for you and reserve the rights to use them without inviting any legal actions.
Another possible way out to use such photos is to use images that are “labelled for reuse” in the search tools for Google image search. Another way in which you can stay out the lawsuit is to take the permission of the people being captured for using the photos for social media. People love being applauded and given credit for, so do give them their due credit and even tag the participants for wider reach.
To stay out of any legal action for getting videos edited with popular music without owning the rights to the music, you can either use stock music and buy it, or get an original piece of music created for your brand.
Even the unsolicited marketing calls law TCPA has been extended to unsolicited text messages where the sender and receiver have no prior interaction or relation. All these things if not carefully monitored may cause a lot of problem to your brand.
Sweepstake means that you choose a winner at random, it can be by drawing out numbers or any such mechanism where chance dictates the winner. But a contest is a game of skill and anyone who performs best on the basis of a set criteria announced in the beginning is a winner.
It is safer for brands to run contests as they are great source of engagement and are subject to rules within the state. Whereas sweepstakes resemble lottery system which is prohibited by the government. So for promotions on social media, it is suggested to run contests than other luck based winners.
Conclusion
As a responsibility on our part, to let our reader be aware of the possible legal actions and the steps to avoid them, we have tried to list the most common legal issues that ruin your hard earned money and reputation in lawsuits. We hope this will surely help you in managing safe and beneficial social media marketing campaigns.