How Instagram is pushing cannabis brands for influencers

The power of the social media influencer has grown from a curiosity about internet culture to an integral part of the modern market that brands in all sectors ignore at their own risk. Brands whose social media pages are deleted for content violations are now relying on influencers to market their products, and cannabis brands are no exception.

In particular, Instagram, owned by Facebook, has a low tolerance for the marijuana industry and will disable or restrict accounts dedicated to cannabis content if a Terms of Service violation or user complaints are found. But Instagram may be dominated by influencers more than anywhere else online – a reality that helps keep marijuana companies in the social media spotlight.

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum about Unsplash

Over the past year, brands like Canndescent, Papa & Barkley, Hervé and the cannabis subscription service Nugg Club have used influencers to promote their products with great success. The Nugg Club in particular has worked with over 1200 influencers since July 2020 and with 700 influencers so far in 2021. Cannabis companies tap into influencers from a range of demographics, including mom bloggers, eccentric performers like Kimmy Tan, and food bloggers who are well matched for their brands to whip up their products.

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Consumers watch and spend accordingly. Influencers have a pre-built platform and an attentive audience, with recent studies showing that social media influencers have 16 times higher engagement rates than paid media and media alternatives. Social media sites tend to be more lenient with personalized content, making influencers an ideal match for online cannabis promotion regulations.

With a billion monthly users, Instagram has a lot of business marketing potential as well as the ability to dump a campaign before it really starts. Instagram is an important information and communication pipeline for consumers, and if that pipeline closes because brands attempt to sell or promote drugs on their pages, the disruption can be devastating.

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Cannabis companies are allowed to be on the platform to raise awareness or talk about cannabis-related topics like legalization, but this can be a slippery way to get cannabis sold by linking to e-commerce sites that sell it, or poorly marketed products. These are big no-gos, at least on Instagram.

Once an account is deleted, it can be restored in certain circumstances, but loss of reach can mean the difference between a successful brand and a failure that costs millions of dollars. Many companies have started protests against inconsistencies in the implementation of their terms of use by Instagram, claiming that there is a lack of clarity and specifics as to which content is allowed and which is not.

Whether the rules themselves or how they are enforced are inconsistent, the impact of social media silence on businesses and the trend towards using social media influencers to fill the marketing gaps are undeniable.

This article originally appeared in the Green Market Report and was republished with permission.