Social Media Agencies near you

The Competition Bureau states plainly that under the Competition Act it is against the law to advertise or market something in a way that is false or misleading, and it has confirmed that those deceptive marketing provisions apply to influencer marketing just as they do to any other form of marketing. The trigger for disclosure is a material connection: any relationship between the creator and the business that could affect how people judge that creator's independence. A payment is the obvious case, but free product, a discount, an affiliate commission, a business relationship or a family tie all count.

The Bureau's guidance on how to disclose is specific. A disclosure should appear in each post, should be as visible as possible because people will not go looking for it, and should be inseparable from the content so it travels with the post when the post is shared or re-cut. Vague or abbreviated labels are called out as inadequate: a thank-you to the brand, the word ambassador on its own, or shortenings such as SP or Spon do not make the connection clear to somebody seeing the post for the first time. Burying a tag at the end of a long caption or inside a block of hashtags has the same problem.

Responsibility is shared. The Bureau's guidance places obligations on the creator, on the advertiser whose product is promoted, and on the agency or firm that coordinates the sponsorship, and using an agency does not move the advertiser's liability somewhere else. Alongside the statute, Ad Standards administers the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards: clause 1 requires that advertisements not make inaccurate, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims, and clause 7 requires that testimonials, endorsements and other representations of opinion reflect the genuine, reasonably current opinion of the person or organization making them. Ad Standards' interpretation guideline on influencer marketing asks that any material connection be disclosed clearly, prominently and close to the representation being made.

Two separate things are at stake, and contracts often settle only one. The first is access: the platform accounts, the business account structure, the ad account and the payment method attached to it. These should be created under the business's own account, with the agency added as a user at the permission level it needs and removed when the engagement ends. An agency that posts from an account it owns, or that runs your campaigns inside its own ad account, can leave you with no history, no audience and no campaign data if the relationship ends badly.

The second is copyright in the material produced. Under the Copyright Act the author of a work is the first owner of copyright in it, and the exception is narrow: where the author made the work in the course of employment under a contract of service, the employer is first owner unless there is an agreement to the contrary. An agency you engage as a contractor is not your employee, and neither is the freelance photographer it hires. Section 13(4) is the operative rule for anything else: no assignment or grant is valid unless it is in writing signed by the owner of the right being assigned. Paying the invoice does not move copyright on its own.

So the agreement should say which photos, videos, graphics and written posts are assigned to you, and should be signed. Ask the agency to confirm that it has the same written assignment from the freelancers and creators it uses, because it cannot assign to you what it does not hold. Where a creator or agency keeps copyright and grants you a licence instead, read what the licence actually permits: whether you may keep using the material after the engagement ends, edit it, and run it as a paid advertisement rather than an organic post.

A content-only arrangement suits a business that has someone internally who will answer messages promptly but no capacity to produce decent photography and video. The agency shoots, edits and schedules, and the business keeps the conversation. It is the cheapest arrangement to supervise, because nothing the agency does is time-critical in the way a customer complaint is.

Full community management adds the replies, and it changes what you need from the agency: response times, an escalation route and a written rule about what they may and may not say on your behalf. It suits businesses that get real enquiries through direct messages and lose them by answering days late. Paid social is different again. It puts money into platform ad auctions, so it needs its own reporting, its own budget approval and a clear answer about whose ad account the spend runs through. Some businesses run all three, but they are separately priced pieces of work and should be separately reported, because a good organic month can otherwise disguise a poor paid one.