Skip to main content

Instagram’s biggest users don’t properly label sponsored posts, study shows

instagram ftc study 37020042 ml
Panithan Fakseemuang / 123RF
Sure, Instagram has its own advertising option, but marketing from “influencer” profiles is a billion dollar industry. It’s also an industry that does not always follow the rules, according to a recent study from Mediakix. An analysis of Instagram’s 50 accounts with the most followers showed that only seven percent of the posts followed the Federal Trade Commission guidelines.

Tracking the top 50 accounts over the course of one month, 30 of which used sponsored posts, 93 percent did not appear to be compliant with the FTC guidelines. The organization says that whenever a post is the result of some sort of material connection — such as a free product or payment — the post must clearly be labeled as an advertisement. The FTC says both #ad and #sponsored as well as text labels like “sponsored by” are fine, but some brands use a less clear tag such as #sp. The label is also supposed to appear close to the post, not buried in the middle of a long list of hashtags.

The study only considered the top 50 Instagram influencers, a little over half which use sponsored posts. The profiles combined have 2.5 billion followers, seeing an average of 45 posts from each account every month. Around seven percent of those posts were sponsored, but the study showed out of that seven percent, 93 percent did not appear to be FTC-compliant.

The advertisers sponsoring the posts were largely made up by fashion brands at around 61 percent. Travel followed as the second biggest category, making up eight percent of sponsored posts, while food and drink, miscellaneous, apps, beauty, automotive and electronics are an even smaller piece of the pie.

“It’s easy to write off infractions as ‘just hashtags,’ but these disclosures may have profound and far-reaching effects on consumers and the influencer marketing industry,” Mediakix wrote. “Instagram and other social media platforms are seeing more activity from advertisers, which means that users’ feeds are seeing more native advertising and sponsored influencer content than ever before.”

The marketing company noted that earlier studies have shown that many users actually do not mind sponsored posts, particularly younger users.

Editors' Recommendations

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more
How to create multiple profiles on a Facebook account
A series of social media app icons on a colorful smartphone screen.

Facebook (and, by extension, Meta) are particular in the way that they allow users to create accounts and interact with their platform. Being the opposite of the typical anonymous service, Facebook sticks to the rule of one account per one person. However, Facebook allows its users to create multiple profiles that are all linked to one main Facebook account.

In much the same way as Japanese philosophy tells us we have three faces — one to show the world, one to show family, and one to show no one but ourselves — these profiles allow us to put a different 'face' out to different aspects or hobbies. One profile can keep tabs on your friends, while another goes hardcore into networking and selling tech on Facebook Marketplace.

Read more