Social Networking Icon Usage (Part 1)

Social Networking websites have become very popular and are being used by many businesses as a tool to drive traffic to them as well as connect with their customers.  The popular and efficient way to inform visitors of your website (who already know about it) that you are active on certain social networks is to place icons, symbolizing these sites, somewhere on your website.  There are numerous places to find these icons, in various styles, designed by talented graphic designers, downloadable for free.

Just throw into Google “free social networking icons” and you will be surprised by the results. Just because these icons are out there does not mean you are legally allowed to use them since they do have a modified version of the logo of the selected Social Networking websites on them.

Recently we had a customer ask us about where we got some of these icons that we were using and if they would be able to legally use them on their website.  As stated before, there are literally hundreds of icon sets that you can find on the internet that people have made for these Social Networking sites.  Anyone could use a set from any of those but the legal aspect behind using these modified logo versions sent me to do some research to find out if it was legal to alter them into the fancy icons that we keep seeing pop up all over the place.  These icons do accurately represent these logos, since they have to be recognizable to symbolize these sites, but they still are altering the logos.

With background experience dealing with branding, I do know that companies (especially large, well known ones) take pride in their branding and can get very picky about how their logos are used.  Three of the largest, most popular Social Networking websites (and the ones that we use the most of at Miva Merchant) are Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  I visited these sites to take a look at what they published as guidelines to the proper usage of their logo.

Twitter and Facebook do show their logos (along with download links) and buttons/icons that they created that can be used on a website. They did not clearly state that you must use these and these only and did not clearly state that you must not use their logo on any custom background (a custom icon/button).  In the wording they provided, it did push me more to think that they really want you to use their provided logo and icon files and to not use anything custom made.

Twitter asked not to “manipulate the logos or imply sponsorship, endorsement, or false association,” or “use anything other than the most current versions of the Twitter logos,” or “use any other artwork from our site without explicit permission.”  They asked that you “use the current Twitter logo, current Twitter T or the Twitter buttons as a link to your account” (all of those buttons and logos were provided).

Facebook asks that you “not use icons, visuals, logos, etc. taken from the Facebook site” and to use the “page badge” that they provide you with.  This could push you to believe that you must use the icons, logos, and buttons the two sites provide on their website, and nothing else but those.

YouTube only has easily found documentation that mainly goes over their API and logos that can be used in relation to that. They have the same type of basic legal type as Facebook and Twitter but do not touch really how their normal logo can be displayed.

After reading that, you might scratch your head as to why there are thousands, and thousands of websites out there with custom Social Networking icons on them, linking to their account page.  Anyone who has any experience with branding, logos, licensing, or intellectual property (also being business and website owners) should at least have a thought pop into their head as to if it is legal to alter these logos to form custom icons.  With “everyone doing it,” people must just figure it is completely legal.  If these sites really cared, wouldn’t they have to go after the uncountable quantity of sites that have these custom icons on them?  That might be too much effort for them to care.

Digging deeper into this, I found that a lot of the designers who created these custom icons figure that they really are not altering the logos but just placing a custom background behind the logos (that are provided and requested to be used) from the websites of these top Social Networking websites.  Wouldn’t these top Social Networking websites see this as positive advertising by seeing all of these custom icons all over the place?  Where was the first place you learned about Twitter?  I can assume that there is a good percentage that kept seeing the Twitter “T” logo all over the place and one day clicked on it, gaining inspiration from that day forward to create an account and start tweeting.

I could not stop there.  I decided to contact Twitter, Facebook, YouTube to attempt to gain a much better, black and white, conclusion to this. Check back soon to Part 2 of this post that will cover the response I end up getting from them.  Feel free to write a comment below.