As alcohol distributors and retailers, the various states make it our responsibility to make certain that we are not serving or advertising our products to minors. Social media can make it easier for minors to get access to us and us to them, so it is imperative in the short term that we be sure that we are doing our best to target only those aged 21 or older with our social media efforts. If we don’t take care to do that now, we may find ourselves on the outside looking in on the electronic future that our consumers will be living in.
What can you do to to vet or qualify your fans and followers to make sure they meet those requirements?
Facebook is pretty simple. For starters, you’re using a Facebook Page for your business and not a personal profile, correct? If you are not using a Facebook Page you’re already making a mistake that needs to be rectified. Beyond that, Facebook collects a lot of information about its members, including their age, so Facebook knows how old your potential page fans are.
All you need to do is to edit your page settings to make your page visible to only people over the legal drinking age. Facebook makes that easy. Go to Page Edit, then Settings and change your Age Restrictions to “Alcohol-Related”. Facebook will then restrict access to your page and limit access only to people who claim to be of legal drinking age in their country of residence. For the United States, that age is 21.
Twitter is a little tougher because Twitter does not collect age or country of residence data in any sort of systematic way. In fact, it has been estimated that only about 4% of Twitter users have accurately volunteered their ages, so you will never really know the ages of your followers. Twitter does “require” that users be at least 13 years of age, but that doesn’t really help us.
However, you can “vet” your new Twitter followers with a service that I use called SocialOomph. Simply create a free account with SocialOomph.com, then follow their pretty simple instructions to “vet” your new followers. In short, this method allows for an automated message or disclaimer to be sent to any new follower informing them that you will only accept followers who are age 21 or over. Just remember that your message will have to fall under the 140 character Twitter limit!
If you like, you can use the automated SocialOomph.com message to ask people to respond to you to verify that they are 21 or over. New followers who do not respond to such a message should be blocked from your Twitter account. This method takes a little more work on your part that just sending out an automated disclaimer, but it is not that hard to do.
If you are blogging on an alcohol related topic, it’s a great idea to make sure that your blog header warns potential readers that you only welcome those who are 21 or older to your site.
Of course, there is no fool-proof way to verify anyone’s age. False claims can be made and I.D.’s can be faked, but none of that eliminates our responsibility to do our best to verify that we are in compliance with federal, state and local laws in a heavily regulated industry. Don’t let a lack of doing something simple now make it harder later for you to do business later!
Tags: 21, advertising, age, alcohol, followers, law, legal, media, minors, serve, social, socialoomph.com, vet
