Brand Safety: How to Protect Your Brand on Social

Safety concerns everyone. Brand safety, that is.

A recent study found that 75% of brands have experienced a brand security incident within the last year. Almost half of these companies received some form of social media coverage as a result of these incidents.

In this new world of social advertising, brand safety issues are not an “if” – they are a “when”.

Protecting your brand reputation in this evolving landscape requires collaboration, forethought, and planning. To help you, we’ve put together everything you need to know to create brand safety guidelines for a social-first world.

Read on to learn how to limit brand safety risk on social media.

What is brand safety?

Brand safety is all about risk mitigation. In advertising, brand safety refers to the measures that protect a brand from mishaps that could damage its reputation.

These measures largely focus on preventing ads from appearing alongside inappropriate or offensive content. For example, a company can implement brand safety measures that prevent its paid advertising efforts from appearing in content that promotes hate speech or violence.

In this case, the average consumer could misinterpret the placement as an endorsement of the content itself. A recent study found that 49% of consumers say their perception of a brand is negatively impacted when it appears next to objectionable content.

Why is brand safety important?

It’s like the old saying goes, if you don’t plan, you plan to fail.

A proactive brand safety plan is the only way to mitigate social media risk. While most social networks have standards in place to prevent ads from being displayed in malicious content, these standards are usually developed after a brand safety flaw has revealed a threat.

For example, in March 2017, several advertisers were forced to pause or withdraw their spend on YouTube ads after being called out for the ad alongside homophobic and racist content. While the controversy was unfortunate, it highlighted the need for enhanced safeguards in programmatic social advertising.

Risk is a natural part of launching a new social network, feature, or tool. If you let that keep your brand from jumping on the latest social media marketing advances, you risk falling behind your competitors and falling out of favor with your target audience. That’s a big risk in itself.

The only real way to protect your business online is to create brand safety guidelines that understand and take into account the social media landscape.

Brand Safety and Social Media

Social media advertising is forecast to grow 25% in 2022, reaching $137 billion in ad spend.

As paid social gaming grows, so do the potential risks. Communications and marketing professionals need to consider a number of potential threats to brand safety, including:

Fortunately, social is also a powerful risk detection and prevention tool. One of the many benefits of social listening is that you can use it to monitor the larger conversations surrounding your brand and shed light on all sources of potential controversy before they get out of control.

Brand safety stats to watch out for

Managers are also increasingly investing in the new world of brand safety. A recent study by Weber Shandwick found the following:

• 75% of global leaders have recently experienced a reputation crisis that could have been prevented.
• 39% of global executives have experienced a crisis that has impacted their company’s brand reputation in the last two to three years.
• 87% of executives say customers are the most important stakeholder when it comes to managing a company’s reputation.

Social media is central to consumers’ daily lives. It’s the first place they turn when they’re looking for information, entertainment, or an opportunity to express their thoughts and opinions.

If companies are to remain in the good graces of this primary stakeholder, they must rethink their brand safety policies from the perspective of social alignment.

How to limit brand safety risk on social media

The easiest way to limit brand safety risk on social media is to create comprehensive brand safety guidelines. But before you can do that, it’s important to become familiar with the existing brand safety controls on popular networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok.

Brand Safety on Metaplatforms

Meta offers multiple brand safety controls that work on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. These features allow you to choose the level of control over where your ad appears. Placements can be restricted by content topic, format, and even source.

Brand Safety on Twitter

twitters Brand Safety Marketing Collection offers both technical and general advice on how to protect your brand on the network. Their efforts to make Twitter a safe place for brands and communities include various content moderation features and ongoing partnerships with independent expert organizations.

Brand safety on YouTube

In 2021, YouTube became the first digital platform to receive content-level brand safety accreditation from the Media Rating Council. Their continued accreditation speaks to the many initiatives Google has taken to ensure advertisers get the most from their investments in the network.

YouTube’s brand safety features have recently been overhauled to align with those available through Google Search and Display Ads.

Brand safety on TikTok

Earlier this year, TikTok launched its Brand Safety Center to provide marketers with breaking news and recommendations on brand suitability within the network.

As its presence grows in the social media landscape, the TikTok team has been hard at work developing brand safety solutions within its advertising platform. As of today, these features include the TikTok inventory filter, as well as some pre- and post-bid security tools.

Build brand safety guidelines into your social media strategy

Documented brand safety guidelines can empower others to participate in risk prevention strategies. To create and distribute your policies with maximum efficiency:

Define brand standards

What is “inappropriate content”?

The answer may seem simple, but the more you delve into it, the more nebulous it becomes. For example, one might assume that all content related to illegal drugs is inappropriate. In reality, this would result in filtering ads from sources that share news features, educational content, or preventive resources on the subject.

To find out where your business is finding the many different types of inappropriate content, you need to talk about it. Host a roundtable to talk about these resources from the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Outline the risk you are comfortable with and create an exclusion list for paid advertising.

Designate a contact person for questions about brand safety

Brand safety is everyone’s responsibility. However, when it comes time to launch a crisis response strategy, you should limit it to one or two people in charge.

Decide which parties are responsible for assessing incoming risks and response needs. Once the decision is made, socialize the role in your company. That way, if an employee becomes aware of a potential brand safety risk, they know who to call.

Sketch a reaction strategy

Even the most avoidable crisis can feel random when it occurs. An actionable response strategy enables your team to work quickly and efficiently when addressing stakeholder concerns.

Create a crisis management plan that outlines what steps to take in the event of a brand security incident. People will likely turn to your social pages for updates on how your business is responding, so make sure you include guidelines for sharing public apologies as well.

Set up a social listening topic

Use a social listening tool to set up a brand health topic so you can monitor the ongoing conversations around your brand.

Sprout’s listening tool has three features that can help you proactively address burgeoning brand health crises:

• Peak Alerts to notify you of changes in conversational activity around your listening topics.
• sentiment analysis to understand trends in audience perception around your brand.
• word cloud to quickly observe what topics are driving conversations around your brand.

Create onboarding training

The World Wide Web is a big place. Keeping track of all potential brand safety threats is nearly impossible for a single team. To protect your brand reputation, you must equip everyone with the resources they need to stop a threat.

Ask managers to include links to brand safety guidelines and protocols in all onboarding materials. Include brief introductions to why these materials are important and what teams can do to help.

Brand safety comes first

Protecting a brand’s reputation is not the responsibility of a single team. Everyone in your organization should be able to nip a potential brand safety mishap in the bud.

Complete this corporate communications plan template and share it with your team so they know what to look out for when it comes to brand safety. The better prepared you are today, the less you have to worry that a crisis could damage your brand reputation tomorrow.