If you work in drinks marketing and have ever taken a look at competitors on social media, one thing is clear: Instagram is a minefield for alcohol marketers.

You’ll see some brands that age-gate (prevent under 18s from viewing) their content - and many that don’t. Or brands that simply use their ‘biography’ space to tell followers they need to be over 18 (or 21) to follow them, as if a 17-year-old will take any notice.

We’ve seen brands fill these same biographies with legal disclaimers - some even provide a link to a downloadable PDF of terms and conditions designed for user generated content, which get used across all of their social platforms without specific relevance to Instagram itself.

The result of all this is a mess: accounts with timid content, barely posting at all in some cases, burdening users with PDFs to read (which will likely be ignored completely) and from the tone of their profiles, clearly fearful that they aren’t following the rules correctly. Ultimately, this is a bad experience for both brands and consumers.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Instagram seems to occupy a uniquely challenging place in the marketing landscape: covered by, for UK marketers, three separate sets of rules. Some of these rules are approaching a decade old - written at a time when social media was a totally different beast. The result is that many brands are using non native techniques - things that aren’t designed to be used on Instagram, such as PDFs - to try to get their message across.

For those that want to improve, here are, as far as we can tell, the rules alcohol marketers should be following while using Instagram:

1 - Understand the rules that cover the channel

Paid-for posts will be covered by the CAP Code/ASA. Content that is not paid for fall under sales promotion and will be covered by Portman. And the whole thing will be covered by a third set of rules from self-regulatory body the European Forum for Responsible Drinking (ERFD), drawn up in 2011. It seems that many of the age restrictions in biographies and PDF terms and conditions documents may have come from here. They even have their own PDF, which is actually quite useful.

It’s fair to say the result is a bit of a mess - almost impossible for brands to be confident that they are both marketing effectively and remaining compliant.

2 - Age-gate your Instagram channel

Frustratingly the process is rather long-drawn out and Instagram doesn’t make it particularly easy.

The process on Facebook can be done easily, via a self-service online page. But despite being owned by the same parent company, on Instagram, nothing comes up via search, and you ultimately need to speak to an advisor to get the age gating in place. In our experience, it can even be hard to reach the right person to do this.

With more emerging and younger audiences wanting to spend their time on Instagram over Facebook these days, the channel will have a larger proportion of underage and vulnerable audiences. Making this process harder than it needs to be is simply not good enough.

3 - Use inherent features, such as Instagram story highlights to naturally talk about legal restrictions

Too many alcohol brands fill up their bios with links to content & community guidelines that don’t get read by the user. And if you do read them, they’re totally irrelevant to the platform and it’s functionality. Instead try creating an Instagram story highlight with only the relevant information for Instagram. For example:

• Create a story highlight called something like ‘House Rules’ and add a no under 18s icon as the highlight cover.
• Add a story to this highlight for each rule you want to include.
• Or if that’s too much effort for you, just do one story highlight that links to your content guidelines on your site - you’ll need more than 10,000 followers to use the link function in stories though.
• The same rule applies to other channels. On Twitter you could use the ‘Moments’ or ‘Pinned Posts’ feature, and on Facebook use the ‘About’ section, for this rather than cramming everything into the short bio.

4 - Use your Instagram biography to do what it was designed for

Many surprisingly well-known brands are clearly so worried about compliance here that they don’t use their bio as a bio, but instead cram it full of legal disclaimers. Sometimes they don’t even mention their product or link to the site.

So fill your profile with a proper description once you’ve moved your responsible drinking measures into a different place. This is more appropriate for the user and ultimately better for the brand. If, after age-gating your profile in step one, you still want to keep a mention of age in there then use the emoji specifically designed for it.