If you’ve even been near cannabis social media, you know it’s one of the biggest headaches as a marketer in the industry. You can’t run paid ads the same way other industries do, and organic social is also highly restricted.
Massive brands with followers in the tens of thousands are regularly shut down and lose all their progress in an instant, making it a high-effort platform, and, to some, a questionable reward.
However, the numbers don’t lie: consumers spend 2-3 hours a day on average on social media platforms. 81% of consumers’ purchasing choices are influenced by posts on social media.
In other words, organic social media for cannabis businesses is one of the only marketing channels that actually get in front of customers where they spend the most time.
So, how do you post on social media without getting shut down? At Cannabis Creative, we’ve worked with 600+ cannabis companies across the US and beyond for the past 10+ years and figured out the strategies that work best for cannabis social media.
Our experts have put together the best masterclass for you to learn from our experience and apply it to your business in just 12 minutes. Download the on-demand workshop today to get started:
Why Organic Social Matters More for Cannabis Than Almost Any Other Industry
Although cannabis content is restricted on most major platforms, social media remains central to how everyday consumers are getting information. Whether it’s politics or buying decisions, social media can shape public opinion, making the conversations on these platforms more important than ever to participate in.
Marketing research tells us that it takes 7 interactions before a consumer actually remembers a brand, meaning frequency of exposure is critical to purchase decisions, and ultimately, loyalty. That type of exposure and frequency is much easier to accomplish on social media, where your post can show up on a user’s feed week after week.
For this reason, organic social media for cannabis businesses doesn’t act like a direct traffic channel, but rather a community-building one. Instead of measuring revenue or website visits from social, the metrics that actually matter are going to look more like comments, shares, engagement rate, inbox activity, and so on.
Customers who feel like they know your brand before they walk in are more likely to stay loyal, making cannabis social media a centerpiece of your marketing strategy.
So if it’s this important, why are so many cannabis brands struggling – or worse, getting shut down?
The Platform Landscape Is More Complicated Than Most Brands Realize
Not all platforms are created equal for cannabis. The first mistake most brands make is choosing platforms based on where they think they should be, instead of where their audience is or where their content will survive.
Sure, TikTok is all the talk these days, but is it worth the risk? Do you have the resources for consistent video content? What if you don’t have anyone on your team who’s comfortable in front of the camera? How much is that going to cost you in terms of effectiveness on organic social media?
These are the kinds of questions that we get all the time from prospects and clients. In our free cannabis social media training, we break down exactly which platforms we recommend for different types of cannabis businesses, and which ones aren’t worth the risk.
The Biggest Mistakes We See Cannabis Brands Make on Social
After over a decade in the marketing world, we’ve seen the same mistakes from cannabis businesses over and over before we work with them. Each mistake comes back to one thing: social media is meant to be social.
Your brand is just one post on an endless feed of noise: from family, friends, news outlets, ads, and other brands. Think about your own scrolling habits: you likely only pause for someone you know really well or accounts that have given you a laugh or an interesting insight before. Anything that disrupts you from these things is just extra content – and that’s the last place you want your brand to be.
Here are the top 5 mistakes cannabis brands make on social media:
Mistake 1: Treating Social Like a Sales Channel
Remember, social media is meant to be social. If you’re using your organic channels to push deals, pricing, and promotions, not only will you see poor results, but you’re actually putting yourself more at risk for account flags and removal.
Social media algorithms are engineered to keep users on the platform, which means sales-first content that encourages off-platform activity gets suppressed, penalized, and reported faster than almost any other content type in the cannabis space. The brands seeing the strongest organic growth are the ones leading with community, culture, and storytelling.
Mistake 2: Posting Transactional Content
Even for non-regulated brands, content that pushes sales can be more difficult to generate the engagement that algorithms reward. For cannabis brands, just the phrases “Shop now” or “Order online” alone also carry heavy compliance risk.
With so many brands on social media these days, your audience is already being constantly sold to. So staying away from transactional content is the easiest way to stand out. Content that instead focuses on lifestyle, routines, humor, and binge-able formats is what your audience will come back for.
Mistake 3: Avoiding the Camera
There was a time when aesthetic photography and creative graphics would go a long way on social media. Unfortunately, those days are behind us. As video creation becomes easier to execute with just a phone in hand, putting human faces on social media is no longer optional.
Getting in front of the camera is one of the most powerful brand-building tools available. The highest-performing cannabis accounts consistently feature budtenders, founders, and staff because people follow people, and authentic human content drives the kind of engagement that faceless product posts simply can’t.
If your cannabis social media has no faces, no personalities, and no voices, you’re leaving your most valuable brand asset – your people – completely off the table.
Mistake 4: Ignoring Platform Policies Until It’s Too Late
Cannabis accounts operate under far greater platform scrutiny than brands in most other industries, which means a single piece of non-compliant content can trigger flags, restrictions, or permanent removal of an account that took years to build.
Many dispensary social media managers make the critical mistake of fixing flagged content and policy warnings right away to take quick action, without paying attention to patterns of when and why they’re getting flagged in the first place.
It’s not just about adhering to platform policies, but also about understanding the nuances of how these platforms are monitoring for violations. For instance, if you’re experimenting with visuals that push the boundaries of the community standards (say, feature consumption), is your caption also risky? If that post gets flagged, can you figure out whether it was a word in the caption or the visual asset that triggered the warning?
By running true experiments, you can better understand the algorithm and monitoring process, while also keeping your account safe and identifying which components of a post are more risky than others.
Staying compliant on social media is not a one-time setup task; it requires ongoing awareness of evolving platform policies across every channel where you have a presence.
Mistake 5: Chasing Vanity Metrics Instead of Engagement
A cannabis business with 50,000 followers and a 0.5% engagement rate is in a far weaker position than one with 2,000 highly active, loyal community members.
Most cannabis business owners don’t realize this until their social presence fails to move any real business needle. Follower counts and impression numbers are easy to fixate on, but they tell you almost nothing about brand health, algorithm standing, or customer loyalty.
Engagement, on the other hand, such as comments, shares, saves, and direct messages, is the metric that signals to both the platform and your potential customers that your brand is worth paying attention to.
Why ROI Is Hard to Track — And Why That’s Not an Excuse to Deprioritize It
If you’re a business owner, we understand that “lifestyle content” feels really abstract and fluffy. We get it: organic social rarely shows up clean in your POS system or in your sales data. It’s hard to track, but that doesn’t mean a sale didn’t happen because of your cannabis social media efforts.
Brand awareness and familiarity are real business drivers, even when they’re hard to measure. Not to mention, there is a cost to being invisible: if you’re not showing up, your competitors are, which means they’re capturing the attention of customers who would have been yours.
Stuck on what to do?
If you’ve been posting without a real strategy, worrying every time you hit publish, or watching your engagement stay flat, our Head of Social walks through actionable insights for cannabis brands like yours to succeed on social media.
The 12-minute, on-demand workshop covers platform strategy, account protection, content that actually drives engagement, and one tactic you can try today to get immediate organic results.
| Get the Free Cannabis Social Media Training |
Work with a Cannabis Marketing Agency for Your Cannabis Social Media
There’s no getting around the fact that cannabis social media is tricky. It’s restricted, risky, and difficult to measure ROI in traditional terms. However, the internet is changing, and consumers rely heavily on social media to make buying decisions.
The cannabis brands winning the social media game right now aren’t the ones posting the most or constantly showing off products. They’re the ones creating a uniquely online experience, focused around lifestyle, community, and inside jokes that make customers feel attached to the brand before they even walk through the door.
“Chronically online” or not, your cannabis social media is an opportunity to build a brand reputation that precedes itself. To learn more about what exact strategies and content types you need to succeed on social media, watch our 12-minute masterclass or book a free strategy session with our experts to get a tailored plan.