Social media has become an extremely important tool for communicating one's business ideas to promote them personally or through the business world.

Visibility of products or services is just a few clicks away on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, but social media platforms pose a challenge for the protection and enforcement of Intellectual Property rights, particularly trademark law.

Social media activity not only provides information about a product or service associated with a brand, but also contributes to a person's or company's overall image and reputation. Online brand protection begins with consistency of use and messaging. Protecting your brand requires a deep focus, and this should be done before entering the online world.

As the Covid-19 pandemic rips apart the global economy, companies are under pressure to figure out how to win and retain customers.

In recent years, Covid-19 has forced many companies, from mom-and-pop shops to chain retailers, to establish or expand their social media presence to stay in business.

For this reason, the use of social media platforms has increased significantly.

While social media is a crucial option for new and existing brands to promote their products and services, ceding their presence to competitors and protecting their intellectual property is a major challenge.

Social Media Strategies

Big picture trends show that social media strategy is taking a new direction.

Brand protection isn't a one-size-fits-all process; it's not just about keeping your brand safe. There are many different tasks involved, such as:

• Avoid competitors and scammers with multiple domains to protect and promote your brand
• Protecting your brand assets; logo, brand, slogan, content, employees
• Creating a style, telling your story, and maintaining your originality, character, and reputation
• Turning negative emotion into positive and measuring commitment
• Measure your visibility and be the most vocal in your industry

Securing Brand Names on Social Media Sites

Protective enforcement is crucial in light of protecting trademarks against unauthorized use in a commercial environment.

To ensure that your brand, products, logo, and slogan remain unique to you, you must trademark them.

To prevent a competitor from obtaining social media accounts confusingly similar to your trademarked names, a company should consider proactively securing brand names alongside its company name on major social media platforms where its products and/or services will be promoted.

In recent years, legal disputes between brand owners, social media providers and internet users have become an important issue in light of the wide scope of unauthorized use of brands and their reputations on social media.

A number of issues need to be discussed, including the scalability of litigation on a case-by-case basis and whether online service providers should be bound by legal provisions for strict liability.

Online working has seen a significant surge in recent years of the pandemic. It's crucial to monitor and follow developments.

How do consumers connect on social platforms?

What kind of content is trending?

How are people behaving as life slowly returns to normal?

It is important to observe how customers are changing their behavior on social media and keep an eye on the big picture for persistent social media trends.

Understanding the global trend is essential to best position the brand to meet customer expectations.

To understand the psychology behind social media, trademark owners need to consider several issues such as:

• How much time is spent on social media in specific markets?
• Information about the impact of ephemeral content
• Main reasons why people use different platforms
• Changes in the influencer and social commerce space

Yakın tarihli bir pazar araştırmasına göre, yetişkinlerin %46 ila %51’i Kovid-19 salgını başladığından beri sosyal medyayı bariz şekilde daha fazla kullanıyor.

In addition to reaching a wider consumer pool on social media, there are significant benefits for a company that proactively protects its brand on social media with trademark registrations.

The company will have the authority to enforce trademark rights; successfully registered trademarks are more suitable for mergers and acquisitions; the company can license or transfer the brand to generate additional revenue; as a valid asset, trademarks increase the value of the business; trademarks can be used as collateral in certain financial transactions.

Therefore, it is recommended that companies conduct thorough trademark research on the potential brand name, slogan or hashtag before posting a brand on social media by investing time, effort and resources in securing social media topics and domain names to ensure that other companies do not claim exclusive rights on the desired brand.

Identifying domain names as well as social media mentions should be considered across various iterations of the name to avoid the possibility of a confusion claim.

A company may have multiple trademarks within a given company and/or product, so companies should seek advice from experienced trademark attorneys to learn about the benefits of protecting other aspects of their business through trademark protection.

If a competitor uses your trademarked names as a social media account, the company may be able to take advantage of that social media platform's website's trademark infringement dispute resolution process.

If a company has not yet developed a plan for how to use social media to market its products/services, at least the brand will have peace of mind knowing that it is protecting these valuable online brand assets from competitors.

This is a superficial list, but a company should consider registering its company name and brand on these major social media platforms:

•Facebook
•Instagram
•Twitter

Depending on the size of the company, it may dedicate resources to regularly monitoring the company's brands via social media to identify and report any potential infringers.

Creating warnings alerts the brand owner to any potential infringers, such as a sneaky trademark thief. An image recognition system built in line with the brand protection strategy will catch any suspicious copies.

Implementing Social Media Policies

Companies should have an internal social media policy on how to handle trademark infringement issues. The policy should specify the type of content allowed, who is allowed to post content, and the appropriate time to post.

The policy should consider action steps when a violation is detected, escalation/reporting of the issue, and the legal or named social media platforms where the violation occurred.

The policy should provide an approval process before a statement, design, or image is used. This will prevent any third-party claims of infringement.

Trademark counsel should resort to using online agreements for social media platforms to regulate the monitoring of third-party usage and activities.

The policy should also cover enforcement of trademarks and copyrights, taking into account the type of violator, government regulations that may apply, and potential negative impacts on the company.

Hashtags and the Decline of Hashtags

Business people use different types of social media every day to advertise their brands.

Some use their own profiles or websites; some work with influencers to draw attention to their brands; others use cookies to flood the internet with unwanted advertising, and some use hashtags, a very popular tool on social media to draw attention to their brands.

Hashtags serve a very simple but sensible function: to attract attention.

For this reason, the use of hashtags is becoming increasingly common as a marketing strategy for companies and individuals.

Unfortunately, their use can be a headache for trademark owners and damage a company's reputation, as it is very difficult to prevent third parties from publishing reputation-damaging or harmful content through hashtags related to a trademark.

In some cases, unscrupulous individuals also use hashtags on social media to capitalize on someone else's trademark reputation and use it for unauthorized or fraudulent large sales.

Many of these cases have resulted in court decisions upholding the legitimate owner's complaints and punishing the freeloaders for trademark infringement.

Gaps in the policies should be addressed with proper research and common sense by trademark expert consultants.

Conclusion

Sometimes there are no black-and-white answers, and a well-considered action may require the involvement of experts from other fields, such as marketing, communications, public relations, and those working on the development of a product or service under a specific trademark.

As additional social media networks will continue to evolve and grow, and the number of websites offering products and services will steadily increase, challenges in intellectual property protection related to protecting brands on social media will persist.

The success of brands can be measured by their reputation and recognition by consumers.

Social media plays a key role in the development of these aspects.

When a company takes the necessary steps to actively protect and monitor its brand on social media, the benefits of registering trademarks can minimize risk.