If you’re getting compensated in any way, use #Ad or [Ad]

It might not be what you want to hear, but you need to know it all the same

Jul 17, 2023
Reading Time: 12 minutes
Content Strategy & SEO, News

Hello gorgeous!

Right, this newsletter is going to be a little bit different. I’m not going to have different topics this week, we’re going to focus on one thing, and one thing only.

This is massive, and all my creator & entrepreneur friends need to know about it if you advertise your products and services or promote affiliate links anywhere online.

This edition may get repetitive and jargony, but stick with it. I want to make sure that you have all the information that I’ve found so that you’re covered.

I can give you all the details, but it’s totally up to you what you do with it.

Honestly, I’m fucking tired of saying this to people. I’ve DM’d, I’ve mentioned it in Slack, I’ve tweeted about it, and nobody’s listening. Why am I the only one who’s taking this seriously?

I’m tired of no one listening when I’m trying to help.

I’m tired of hearing:

“Oh, but this is only Twitter, and people will just move somewhere else.” No, it’s not just Twitter.
“Looks like it’s just in the UK and doesn’t apply to me.” Wrong, as I’ll explain below.
“I’ll just carry on exactly how I’ve been doing things and hope for the best.” Fine, but don’t say I didn’t tell you about it.
“Yes, but [insert any number of personal objections here].”

So I apologize that this email is swearier than normal, but I’m exhausted trying to make people understand that whether they agree or not, whether they like it or not, this is happening.

All my personal opinions or thoughts will be in pink through this edition.

I’m still second-guessing whether this email is a colossal waste of time, am I just screaming into a void? But I can’t not say anything. Ignorance isn’t a defense. You need to change how you’re promoting/ advertising on all your social media platforms. Now.

TL;DR: If you’re promoting an affiliate link, or one of your products or services on any social media platform, you have to declare that it’s a promotion using [Ad] or #Ad as the first text in every post it’s mentioned in.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an affiliate link, or if it’s a product of yours.

If you’re getting any form of money, incentive, kickback, or discount, you have to declare it at the beginning of the social post.

This also goes for affiliate links on your website and in your newsletters.

Acknowledging my personal bias: my biggest audience is on Twitter, so this is how I first found out about it. I also support clients as a Social Media Manager, and refuse to be negligent in my support.

In Case You Weren’t Paying Attention To The TL;DR

Any time you add an affiliate link, or link to one of your own products anywhere online – this is a promotion or advert.

If you get money, a discounted rate, or a kickback – this is advertising and it must be stated

Therefore, you have to put #Ad or [Ad] at the start of every social media post where you’re advertising the thing.

On all platforms.

If you have affiliate links on your website, you have to put [Ad] or #Ad at every point in the body text where the affiliate link appears, on every page where they appear.

If you’re getting compensated in any way, use #Ad or [Ad]

Helpfully, there are no hard and fast consequences in the documents and sites listed below for what would happen if we don’t comply with this. It’s all “might be” and “may result in” which isn’t helpful for us at all. However, there are places for people to report if they find pages, sites, or socials that don’t follow these guidelines.

Twitter-Specific Terms

Many of us advertise affiliate links in our tweets and are well aware that we’re just that; affiliates. Not only this but many affiliate accounts we have, go to great lengths to remind us that we’re not partners and shouldn’t call ourselves anything of the sort.

Most of us understand the term paid partnership is for things like sponsors on IG or YT. But that’s not what Twitter is using it for.

Helpfully (not), Twitter uses the term “Paid Partnership” to include anything where we get any incentive, regardless of whether it’s monetary or not. If we get a discount, if we have a special link, if we get perks, these are all paid partnerships in the eyes of Twitter.

Moreover, Twitter considers any mentions of our own stuff as adverts as well. Because most of us are personal brands, we talk about our offers and products all the time and don’t consider that these are adverts because our whole account is one big advert for our personal brand. But that’s not what Twitter thinks. If you’re advertising something of yours, and people can click on a link and pay for it, that’s advertising.

Twitter’s Paid Partnership Policy.

On this page, they state that a paid partnership is any of the following:

“A user, including a creator or brand, has been or may be compensated for a Tweet (including in the form of money, gifts, loans of products, or other rewards or incentives), or
A Tweet is created as part of, or in connection with, a commercial relationship (such as a current or recent ‘brand ambassador’ arrangement), or
A Tweet includes an affiliate link or discount code through which the user might receive some kind of benefit, incentive or reward.”

Directly lifted from the policy, which you can find here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/paid-partnerships

I’ve drawn attention to “may be” because we’ll get to that in a bit. Just remember it for now! “Commercial relationship” will come up again later as well.

The UK Version

This is where people are having a problem.

At the bottom of Twitter’s Paid Partnership policy page, there is an extra section for the UK. This doesn’t mean that the whole page is only applicable to the UK, it means that the UK has extra stuff!

Now, I don’t know if I can see the UK extra section because I’m in the UK, and maybe it’s showing me that information because it’s geolocated me. I don’t think it is, because when I asked in a Slack community, others could see it too, and they’re not in the UK.

This is what it says:

“Creators should include all applicable disclosures that are required to indicate the commercial nature of their content, such as ‘#ad’. Remember that all Tweets with commercial intent, including own-brand Tweets created by a user who has a commercial interest in the relevant brand (for example, as a director) will require a disclosure.”

This is the part that’s relevant to promoting your own stuff. You’re (often) the Founder/CEO/Director of your personal brand.

The way I’m reading all of this, not just the UK stuff, is through the lens of “commercial intent” (hence why I highlighted it in the quote above). If I intend to make money from this tweet, either right away because someone is signing up for a program through my affiliate link, or by putting someone through an email funnel because they signed up for my newsletter, that’s an advert and therefore requires #ad to be at the start of the tweet.

Circling Back to “may be”

In the Twitter Paid Partnership policy, way back towards the top of this email, I told you to remember: “A user, including a creator or brand, has been or may be compensated for a Tweet (including in the form of money, gifts, loans of products, or other rewards or incentives).”

So what does that mean?

Here’s where things get a little muddy (in case they weren’t already).

What happens if I promote my newsletter, and inside that newsletter I sell to my audience?

I might get compensated for sending that newsletter promo tweet if someone buys my thing at some point in the future.

The Legal Side

Influencers’ guide to making clear that ads are ads

At the bottom of the Twitter Paid Partnership policy page, inside the UK section, there is a link to the ASA’s “Influencers’ guide to making clear that ads are ads” page (from the Advertising Standards Authority Ltd.).

At the bottom of that page, there is a PDF download, which makes it super easy to understand your responsibilities as a creator/business owner, it’s also really accessible. Even though this is the UK edition, it’s super visual and would be good to get so that you know exactly what you need to do.

Although, helpfully, even though the FTC’s guide for the same thing in the US is mentioned on the Paid Partnership policy page, it’s not linked, so you have to hunt for it. Never fear, I found it (below)! Although it’s not as visual as the UK download, it still covers everything you must abide by.

Some of the key takeaways from the UK PDF are:

The disclosure needs to be at the same point as the link.
If the post is about an affiliate link, “#Ad” or “[Ad]” need to be the first characters in the post – regardless of which platform it’s posted on.
It’s not enough to have “this email may contain affiliate links, and if you click on them, I might get a small kickback” in your newsletter footer. You can still have this (like I have in mine, below), but it’s not enough on its own, all links to affiliate products or your own, must have [Ad] or #Ad next to them in the body text where they appear.
This counts for all platforms – social media, YouTube, Pinterest, your blog, newsletters, everywhere.

Seriously, download that PDF, it’s really easy to understand. You can ignore that and say, “I’m not in the UK so it doesn’t apply to me,” but I can assure you it does. The FTC Disclosures 101 page (explained below) states, “If posting from abroad, U.S. law applies if it’s reasonably foreseeable that the post will affect U.S. consumers. Foreign laws might also apply.”

FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking

You can find the rather lengthy document here, but here are some bullet points that I took from it:

The FTC works on endorsements. If you mention something, you’re endorsing it, regardless of whether you’re being paid to or not.
You can’t use “affiliate link” because people might not understand what that means.
This guide is based on what the average consumer would understand. Meaning terms like “affiliate link” and “commissionable link” aren’t something that people would understand means that money is happening.
Disclosures need to be obvious and up front. Always.

This document has hyperlinked sections, which makes it easy to get to the bit that’s relevant. One of the sections to pay attention to, if you have affiliate links is ”What about affiliate or network marketing?”

The most important thing is that, again, it doesn’t matter where you have an affiliate link, or link to your own thing, it has to be disclosed that it’s a relationship. End of story.

Further, in June 2023, they updated “16 CFR Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” which include “a new definition of “clearly and conspicuously.”.” This is an 84 page PDF (seriously, how are we supposed to know what rules we’re supposed to be following with that much to look through?!), and if you search for “conspicuously,” you get results on 33 pages.

The basic upshot remains the same, if you’re getting money or freebies, or a discount, disclose it. If you’re advertising or promoting something of yours or a product you have a commercial relationship with, you must disclose it.

FTC’s Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers

This document is shorter and more digestible, and while we might not like to think of ourselves as influencers in our fields, people do pay attention to us.

This page is easier to understand because it details exactly what a relationship is (and isn’t) and when you do and don’t have to disclose.

Key takeaways from this are:

If you’re saying something about a product you bought and you’re not in any partnership with them, you don’t need to disclose that it’s not a brand relationship
The disclosure needs to be obvious & upfront. Every. Single. Time. Where the affiliate link is, especially in blog posts, etc.
It must be hard to miss – don’t hide it inside a load of other hashtags on socials, and don’t put it on your website on your “About Me” page. The disclosure has to appear where the link is placed – on every single page on your website where you use that link.

This is going to mean a lot of work for a lot of us. We need to go through all our web pages and make sure that anywhere we’ve used * after a link and then put “* affiliate link” at the bottom of the page, actually now has either #Ad or [Ad] directly after the hyperlinked word.

To get this done, we need a plan, potentially using a sitemap, to know which pages we’re done and which we haven’t, and go through them methodically, one by one, until they’re all done.

Final Thoughts on #Ad + [Ad]

Just pretend everything below this is in pink!

No, it’s not great but before you bitch, it’s four fucking characters. It’s not the end of the world; #Ad and a space, or [Ad].

Yes, we’re limited in characters (specifically in Twitter), but if it’s the difference between me using #ad or having my Twitter account put in Twitter jail, I know which one I’d go for.

If you have a scheduling tool, head into it and see what you have scheduled that’s either advertising an affiliate product or your own, and add #Ad or [Ad] as the first characters now, before you forget, or pop it on your to do list, but get it done soon. If you use something like TextExpander for social captions, head into it and add [Ad] or #Ad to all the snippets you use (regardless of how frequently).

Personally, I’ve already headed into my Twitter scheduler and changed all my autolists to include #ad as the first characters when I’m posting affiliate links or links to sign up for my newsletter. It took me all of about 15-minutes.

Of course, it will take time to go through all our website pages and make sure that we’re compliant, but our websites are integral to our personal brands and businesses. I’d rather set aside 30 minutes a day to go logically through a handful of webpages and get them all up to scratch, than have my website reported for not complying with these rules and potentially lose it.

Side note, if you’re looking for Instagram’s Promotion Guidelines to see what they require, don’t get your hopes up.

As I said above, there are no set in stone consequences for non-compliance with these rules. Sometimes they’re not even called rules. But the simple fact is, these documents are from the FTC and ADA, and this is what’s expected. Maybe they don’t have the infrastructure to police this yet, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t ever have the ability to do this.

Like I said, you can disagree with it all you like, but this is how it is.

Pay attention or not, the choice is yours.