Top Tips For Better Social Media for the Cannabis Industry
One of the hottest social media platforms is Instagram and it is also one of the newer platforms. However, Instagram comes second to Facebook in terms of active users with 400 million and 77% of these users are actually outside of the US. The platform as seen over 40 billion images being shared with an average of 80 million posts per day. This makes it a hotbed for advertising and marketing on a local and global scale. Businesses in the marijuana industry should look at how they can make the most out of this social media platform particularly since they are in a controversial industry.
Finding The Tangible In An Intangible Brand
It can be tricky to share pictures depending on what your company offers. If you have a business that produces high-quality and beautiful products then you will not have a problem creating pictures that showcase and flatter what your company has on offer. However, if you run a cannabis consulting firm then you could have a hard time coming up with ideas for pictures to share.
One of the solutions that you could use is to have pictures in your work environment that allows your followers to see into the daily workings of your company. These behind the scenes picture can work very well for your business because a picture that has a face in it is 38% more likely to get customer engagement than other pictures. You should consider letting your employees have fun with this and bring in multiple perspectives, senses of humor and interests that will keep your feed fresh. If people get bored of your posts then they are not going to continue following you.
Another potential solution will be to share pictures and experience that are relevant to your brand, even if they are not uniquely for your company. The cannabis community has a great sense of humor and you could look at posting weed-related memes or images that do very well in terms of tags and likes. It is also fairly easy to create amazing images of people using cannabis and cannabis itself.
Build A Community With A Unique Hashtag
A great way to illicit more customer engagement and to raise awareness of your brand is to choose a hashtag which is brand-specific and interesting. The hashtag will also have the benefit of being cross-leveraged with other social media sites. Hashtags can be used on Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Facebook.
The problem is that many small businesses do not know how to utilize their hashtags because it is generally the large companies like Nike that you see doing this. If you are a small business then you can turn to Infatuation for inspiration. Infatuation is a restaurant review website that was started in 2009 and was relatively unknown until they started using the hashtag #EEEEEATS. The website introduced the hashtag in their bio by saying that it was for anyone who was serious about food, but does not take food very seriously. There are currently 2 million posts with this hashtag.
Like the foodie industry, the cannabis community loves hashtags. The general hashtag #cannabis is the most popular with over 4.7 million mentions. It is important that you try and think of something that relates to your niche of the market and remember that everyone loves humor.
Interact With Others To Grow Your Following
While it should be common sense when dealing with social media, if you want to grow your audience you need to have some give and take. A lot of businesses find that their posts are like shouting out into the night and hoping that someone shouts back. For many people social media is everyone talking, but no one listening. Tools such as Vibbi can help you grow your Instagram following.
So, to stand out of the crowd you need to be interesting and worth following. To do this you should be interested and follow others. You can find people to interact with by looking at the hashtags that are related to your niche, then like or comment on posts that you see. Following other users will also help in terms of follow-backs particularly if you have liked their posts.
If you want to build a loyal Instagram following you need to be willing to put the time in. Show that you are vested in your followers and care about them. This will help you gain support and increase the overall visibility of your business.
