Brand Safety: Managing Risk and Building Trust on Social Media

In today’s digital age, it’s crucial for marketers to take steps to protect their brand safety online.

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 with content that can harm its reputation.

In this article, we’ll share 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.

What is brand safety?

Brand safety means ensuring that a business’s ads are not associated with content that could damage the brand’s reputation. This includes avoiding content that is offensive, controversial, or could be associated with illegal or unethical activities.

While brand safety is most often discussed in the context of paid ads, it also applies to organic social, or really anywhere that a brand could appear online.

Why does brand safety matter?

Brand safety matters for marketers because it directly impacts the reputation and image of the brand they’re managing.

67% of consumers say they would likely stop using a brand or product if they saw the brand’s advertising alongside false, objectionable, or inflammatory content.

In terms of other stakeholders, a brand safety incident can also damage a brand’s relationships with partners, suppliers, and other collaborators.

For marketers, brand safety is most relevant when running social media ads. In 2021, brands spent $181.2 billion globally on social advertising, with more being spent each year.

No matter how big or small your paid social budget is, spending time to optimize brand safety will help you make the most of your dollars spent.

Brand safety risks

Advertising next to inappropriate or offensive content

Programmatic advertising is a media buying format in which advertisers buy placements through ad distribution platforms, rather than individual publishers. In 2022, 90% of digital ad spending was on programmatic advertising.

It’s a highly efficient way to buy targeted ads with wide reach, but the tradeoff is that advertisers don’t have full control over where their ads appear.

With many social media ad platforms offering “audience networks,” the risk is that your social media ad may appear on a website next to inappropriate or offensive content. Here’s an example:

Source: Reddit

In this case, the advertiser likely targeted the keywords “THC” and “cannabis,” not anticipating a placement within an article about a negative incident caused by a cannabis product.

Source: Reddit

In this example, the Snapchat advertiser could have avoided the unfortunate placement by adding names of unsuitable publishers like Pornhub to their keyword blocklist.

Endorsing problematic influencers

Collaborating with a public figure, influencer, or content creator can widely benefit your brand awareness. However, these collaborations also come with more risks for brands, since 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.

Although it meant dropping a product line, Adidas determined that associating with a public figure who went against the company’s values posed a bigger risk to sales.

Using a hashtag associated with risky content

When launching a new campaign or content series, we highly recommend using hashtags to improve reach and engagement. However, you must research the hashtag 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.)

Paying for fraudulent clicks

Programmatic advertising also risks attracting bad traffic. If your brand’s ads accidentally appear on unsavory websites, your website can become the target of large amounts of bot traffic.

Why is this bad? Besides the fact that non-relevant traffic will hurt your site’s conversion rates, bot traffic can worsen your search results rankings on Google and other search engines. In 2020, ad fraud cost businesses $35-40 billion.

How to protect your brand on social media

Brand safety may be one of the biggest challenges for brands online, largely due to the UGC nature of social media. After all, you can’t stop users from mentioning your brand alongside offensive content.

However, we’ll tell you five things you can do to protect your brand safety.

1. Establish a social listening strategy

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:

• Set alerts for your brand name + “crisis keywords/phrases,” such as “disaster,” “nightmare,” “accident,” “horrific,” and “never again”
• Set thresholds to detect spikes in mentions, messages, and comments
• Monitor for large changes in sentiment, which may indicate a negative or positive customer situation

You can also use an advanced social listening tool like Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch to monitor social sentiment over time and put out (metaphorical) fires before they start.

Request a Demo of Hootsuite Insights

2. Make a social media crisis plan

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:

• Criteria for when to pause posts during major world events (and criteria to decide when to resume posting)
• Guidelines for responses to large volumes of customer complaints and issues
• Messaging approval processes and contact information for key stakeholders required for approvals
• Internal communications plan

With Hootsuite, you can pause all posts with one click and show a warning for all users in your organization.

3. Create a social media employee policy

With the rise of TikTok and LinkedIn, more and more employees are creating content related to their employers. Similar to the risks with influencers, employee-generated content can jeopardize brand safety even more as employers can’t control employees’ personal profiles.

One way to mitigate this risk is to establish a social media policy that explicitly outlines what employees can and cannot do, and how to be good employee advocates.

4. Define your brand’s safety threshold

Before executing a brand safety strategy, you’ll need to know your brand’s risk tolerance.

In addition to topics like pornography, terrorism, and misinformation, brands may also choose to avoid topics like religion, politics, and nudity depending on their values. For example, while Disney would want to avoid placements related to sexual topics, Durex likely would not.

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).

5. Use negative targeting

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.

Platform-by-platform brand safety best practices

Facebook & Instagram brand safety tips

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:

• Inventory filter. Marketers can choose the sensitivity level of the content that ads can appear within. Note that when choosing limited inventory, your reach will be reduced and you may pay higher ad costs.
• Block list. Allows you to input specific URLs, Facebook pages, or Instagram profiles where you don’t want ads to appear.
• Topic exclusions. If you’re running in-stream video ads, you can opt out of specific placements in videos about gaming, news, politics, and religion & spirituality.
• Delivery reports. If you’re not sure which sources to add to your block lists or exclusions, you can review delivery reports to see where your past ads were shown. If you spot a publisher or placement that you want to avoid in the future, you can add it to your block list directly from the report.

Learn more about Facebook’s brand safety controls.

Twitter brand safety tips

Given its roots as a conversation-focused platform, there has always been a higher level of scrutiny on Twitter’s brand safety risks. And with Twitter’s history of misinformation, hate speech, and spam accounts, even the edgiest brands should take extra care to ensure their Twitter ads aren’t violating brand safety standards.

Some ways that you can protect your brand on Twitter:

• Adjacency controls. Add up to 1,000 negative keywords to control the tweets that are shown above and below your ad in a user’s timeline.
• Campaign placements. Control where your ads are placed. You can exclude locations such as within search results, on user profiles, and in replies.
• Content opt-outs. Choose specific content categories where you don’t want ads to be shown.
• Block list. Exclude individual publishers you don’t want your ads to be shown alongside.
• App exclusions. If you’re advertising on the Twitter Audience Platform, you can exclude up to 2,000 apps.
• Keyword exclusions. When setting up your ad campaign, you can add negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing in search results for those terms and being served to users who have tweeted or engaged with those terms.

Read more about Twitter’s approach to brand safety.

TikTok brand safety tips

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:

• Inventory filter. TikTok uses machine learning to analyze the text, audio, and more within a video to define its risk level. Advertisers can then choose their preferred safety level for ads to appear adjacent to.
• OpenSlate. TikTok offers a third-party tool called OpenSlate which calculates what percentage of ad impressions were deemed “brand safe.”
• IAS partnership. Advertisers can opt-in to TikTok’s Integral Ad Science (IAS)’s integration when setting up a campaign, which ensures ads run adjacent to safe content. Post-campaign, advertisers can check the IAS report to see ad viewability, invalid traffic, and app-level brand safety.
• Comment management. TikTok allows advertisers to block comments based keywords, hide or show individual comments, choose a pinned comment, turn comments off, and export comments for bulk analysis.

Read TikTok’s full brand safety center.

LinkedIn brand safety tips

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:

• Block list. If you’re advertising on the LinkedIn Audience Network, you can review the whole list of publishers to know where your ads could potentially appear. If you spot any you’d like to exclude, you can do so by adding them to a block list.
• Allow list. If you’d like LinkedIn to prioritize specific publishers when placing your ads, you can do so by adding them to an allow list.
• Third-party apps. LinkedIn allows you to connect external apps like DoubleVerify, which helps brands avoid unsuitable content and appear on contextually relevant sites and apps.

Read more about LinkedIn’s brand safety features.

Pinterest brand safety tips

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:

• Turn off comments. For organic pins, brands have the freedom to delete comments or turn them off altogether. For paid pins, users cannot comment (this is a default setting and can’t be changed).
• Ad placements. Marketers can manually choose where ads are shown, including browse (home feeds and related pins), search, or all placements.
• Keyword exclusions. Marketers can use negative keywords to exclude their ads from being served in search results associated with those keywords.
• Expanded targeting opt-out. Normally, expanded targeting allows Pinterest to expand the reach of your ads by serving them to people outside of the keywords and interests you specify. However, if you don’t want to risk ads being shown in undesirable contexts, you can turn this setting off.

Read more about Pinterest’s brand safety guidelines.

YouTube brand safety tips

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:

• Inventory modes. By default, YouTube will never show your ads on the most controversial content. That means you’ll never have to worry about your ads appearing on videos with terrorist acts, nudity, and recent sensitive events. With inventory modes, marketers can control the types of contextual violence, profanity, and sexual content that ads appear adjacent to (such as comedy, music videos, and videos showing video games).
• Content exclusions. You can choose to opt out of embedded YouTube videos (shown on websites outside of YouTube.com) and live videos (which can be riskier).
• Negative keywords. Keywords that you add to a blocklist will be used to filter based on keywords in headlines, descriptions, tags, and metadata.
• Brand safety targeting. Allows marketers to target ads based on digital content labels (i.e. suitability for general to mature audiences), sensitive categories, and third-party verification services (including IAS and DoubleVerify).

As the vast amount of content available on the internet can pose risks to businesses, it has become more challenging to guarantee brand safety. However, by following our guidelines above and using customizing each platform’s brand safety tools to your brand’s safety thresholds, you can mitigate these risks and ensure your brand is protected.

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