Protecting your brand's online reputation means getting proactive about brand safety, especially when it comes to social media.
Reputation is everything. That’s why it’s crucial for marketers to take steps to protect their brand safety online, especially when it comes to social media.
Social media does a great job of building brands and connecting businesses with their customers. But it also comes with the risk of associating a brand’s goods or services with content that can harm its reputation.
In this article, we’ll share brand safety statistics, strategies and best practices that marketers can use to safeguard their brand’s reputation on social media. From monitoring and social listening to knowing when to go dark, we’ll provide actionable steps to maximize the safety of your brand online.
Brand safety means ensuring that a business’s ads aren’t associated with inappropriate content that could damage the brand’s reputation. This includes creating policies and measures to protect the brand from appearing alongside content that could be offensive, controversial, illegal or unethical.
Brand safety is most often discussed in the context of paid ads. That’s because social media ads can be a big investment — but they can also pose a serious risk. In 2021, brands spent $181.2 billion globally on social advertising, and that number has only increased since then.
But brand safety isn’t just about paid media. It also applies to organic social or really anywhere that a brand could appear online. In recent years, people have even started talking about “brand suitability,” which is less about avoiding risk and more about proactively associating your brand with positive placements that reinforce your existing reputation.
Taking a proactive approach to brand safety is the best way for marketers to safeguard their brand’s reputation. And your brand’s reputation matters — a lot.
A strong brand reputation means the public considers your brand trustworthy. When you’ve earned someone’s trust, they’re more likely to do business with you and recommend your services to others. A negative brand reputation, though, can tank sales and cause major damage to your brand.
In fact, 67% of consumers say they would likely stop using a brand’s product or service if they saw the brand’s advertising alongside false, objectionable, or inflammatory content.
A brand safety incident can also damage your brand’s relationships with partners, suppliers, and other collaborators.
No matter how big or small your digital marketing budget is, spending time to optimize brand safety will help you make the most of your dollars spent.
In programmatic advertising, advertisers buy ad placements through distribution platforms, rather than individual publishers.
It’s an efficient way to buy targeted ads with wide reach. But it also means advertisers don’t have full control over where their ads appear.
This can mean your social media ad may appear next to inappropriate or harmful content. Here’s an example of a potential brand safety issue:
Source: Reddit
In this case, the advertiser likely targeted the keywords “THC” and “cannabis.” They probably didn’t expect that their ad would appear next to an article about a negative incident caused by a cannabis product.
Source: Reddit
Yikes. In this example, the advertiser could have avoided this placement by adding names of unsuitable publishers to their keyword blocklist.
Collaborating with a public figure, influencer, or content creator can expand your brand awareness. However, these opportunities also come with more risks for brands.
Influencers often share their personal views and opinions on their channels. These opinions may not always align with past or present partners.
One example: the almost decade-long partnership between Adidas and Kanye West’s “Yeezy” product line. This long collaboration came to an end in late 2022 after Kanye West’s public anti-Semitic comments.
The end of this partnership mean Adidas dropped a product line and lost out on big sales numbers. But the brand determined that associating with a public figure who went against their values posed a bigger risk.
When launching a new campaign or content series, hashtags can really help improve reach and engagement. But you have to do your research first. Otherwise, you risk your brand’s posts showing up in a search with unsafe content.
The online clothing retailer, Dorothy Perkins, discovered this the hard way after deciding to use the hashtag #LoveDP. (Don’t Google it, just trust us.)
If you’re not careful with your placements, programmatic advertising also risks attracting bad traffic. If your brand’s ads appear on unsavory websites or alongside fake news, your website can become targeted by bad actors like bot traffic.
Why is this bad? Non-relevant traffic will hurt your site’s conversion rates. Bot traffic can also weaken your position in search results rankings. In 2020, ad fraud cost businesses $35-40 billion.
Brand safety may be one of the biggest challenges for brands online, largely due to the UGC nature of social media platforms. After all, you can’t stop users from mentioning your brand alongside offensive content.
However, we’ll tell you six things you can do to protect your brand safety.
Social listening is a marketer’s best line of defense when it comes to avoiding brand safety incidents.
With a tool like Hootsuite, you can use multiple streams to do things like:
You can also use an advanced social listening tool like Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch. Insights can help you monitor social sentiment over time and put out (metaphorical) fires before they start.
Request a Demo of Hootsuite Insights
What’s just as important as having a well-planned, strategy-based content calendar? Knowing when not to post.
A social media crisis plan is a great tool to protect your brand’s safety. Here’s what it should include:
With Hootsuite, you can pause all posts with one click and show a warning for all users in your organization.
These days, more and more employees are creating content related to their employers. But with any collaboration, there’s risk.
Employers can’t control employees’ personal profiles. That means even employee-generated content can jeopardize brand safety.
One way to mitigate this risk is to establish a social media policy. These documents outline what employees can and can’t do. They also explain how to be good employee advocates.
Even if the content you post to your accounts is carefully curated and well-aligned with your social media policies, public comments and messages left by followers (or trolls) may be far from it.
To make sure that you never miss a tricky message, use a unified social media inbox to capture interactions from all of your accounts.
With Hootsuite Inbox, you can bridge the gap between social listening, brand safety, engagement, and customer service — and manage all of your social media messages in one place. This includes:
… and more.
The all-in-one agent workspace makes it easy to
Plus, Inbox comes with handy automations:
Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.
Book a DemoBefore executing a brand safety strategy, you’ll need to know your brand’s risk tolerance.
Some topics, like pornography, terrorism, and misinformation, are obvious no-gos. But depending on their values, brands may also choose to avoid topics like religion, politics, and nudity.
Most ad platforms offer the option to choose different risk levels of content your ads will appear adjacent to. The levels range from limited (least risky, less reach) to broad (more risky, higher reach).
If you know there are terms or phrases that you never want your brand’s content to be associated with, you can input a list of these terms as “negative keywords” into a blocklist to avoid related placements.
Be wary, though, as negative targeting can decrease your reach unintentionally. For example, a word like “knife” may exclude cooking videos or recipe blogs.
Pro tip: Use your brand’s safety threshold and brand values to come up with negative keywords. Make sure to update them regularly, and consult your social care and customer service teams for terms to include.
Meta’s created a Brand Safety Hub where marketers can customize their brand safety settings which apply to ads shown across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, and the Meta Audience Network.
Before running your next Facebook or Instagram ad campaign, we recommend reviewing the following settings in your Brand Safety Hub:
Learn more about Facebook’s brand safety controls.
Given its roots as a conversation-focused platform, there has always been a higher level of scrutiny on Twitter’s brand safety risks.
Some ways that you can protect your brand on Twitter:
Read more about Twitter’s approach to brand safety.
Although TikTok has had relatively less time than its peers to develop its brand safety policies, the platform already offers a strong combination of industry-standard settings and third-party tools that should reassure any marketer who wants to advertise on TikTok.
Here’s how to use TikTok’s brand safety features:
Read TikTok’s full brand safety center.
Most of LinkedIn’s brand safety controls are applicable when advertising on the LinkedIn Audience Network, which are sites and apps outside of LinkedIn where brands’ ads can be served.
The main settings include:
Read more about LinkedIn’s brand safety features.
Pinterest has high brand safety standards and has developed solid advertiser- and user-focused policies.
Here are some settings to protect your brand on Pinterest:
Read more about Pinterest’s brand safety guidelines.
In 2017, YouTube came under scrutiny for showing ads alongside controversial videos, which resulted in many large brands boycotting YouTube ads. Since then, Google has worked hard to develop its brand safety features to win back the trust of marketers.
These features should help maximize the safety of your brand’s YouTube ads:
As the amount of content on the internet continues to grow, guaranteeing brand safety has become more challenging. By following our guidelines and taking advantage of safety tools, you can mitigate risk and ensure your brand is protected.
Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your target audience, measure results, and more — all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.
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