The use of social media as a marketing tool has been common for just about as long as social media has existed. Often, this type of marketing is based on messaging that promotes a business' goods or services while also trying to foster a deeper connection with a target market by coming, or seeming to come, from an individual whose persona is attractive to that audience.

In many cases, this means that even if a business has a whole social marketing team to develop content, the messages are posted on that specific person's social media accounts as if it were their own off-the-cuff thoughts and experiences; their persona and that of the business become inextricably—and indistinguishably—intertwined.

In some situations, particularly where an individual is very closely associated with a specific business, such fuzziness has led to disputes over who owns these social media accounts: the individual who created the account for their persona or the business that employs them. It's an interesting question because, in many cases, the account bears a name or a title that refers to the individual that created it. There is significant value at stake because the goodwill associated with social media followers, while hard to quantify, can be enormous, as a popular account can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.