Social Media Tips and Techniques for Your Business

 

Most companies have embraced social media as one of the fastest-growing platforms for marketing and outreach. If your business isn’t utilizing this resource, especially in a field as quickly expanding and volatile as cannabis, you’re missing a huge opportunity.

 

Social media can be used not only to  market your storefronts, but also for community outreach, finding new employee candidates, and engaging your existing employees and customers. But utilizing social media is more than just posting cat pictures on Facebook. In this post, you’ll learn our top three basic tips to begin using social media sites—including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram—effectively and appropriately for your business.

 

Choose Your Platforms Carefully

It’s easy to jump on the social media bandwagon and want to be on every site ever created, but that is a fantastic way to overwhelm you or your team and muddle your message. Each social media platform has different best practices and audience demographics and knowing which ones best align with your social media goals will help focus your effort on specific desired outcomes. If you’re looking to hire new budtenders, LinkedIn might be a better bet than Instagram. If you want to show off the beauty of your grow houses and storefronts, Instagram and Facebook might be best. Knowing what you want to do can help you pick the right platforms to develop instead of getting overwhelmed with dozens of different sites. Which leads us to point number two:

 

Make a Plan

Knowing what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing is crucial to ensuring its success. Do you want to help teach people about the intricacies of running a cannabis operation or do you want to entice people to come into your stores? They’re not mutually exclusive, but the more you can narrow down the end result you’re looking for, the easier it will be to figure out what sorts of content you’ll need to create and share. For some step-by-step ideas on how to create a detailed plan for your business, check out this post from the Hootsuite blog.

 

Get Creative

Engaging your audience should be a big part of any social media campaign–if your audience isn’t engaged with your content, they won’t want to engage with your company off the net. The best way to do this is to get creative with the content you’re creating and posting. Don’t be afraid to have a little fun, and don’t use your social media profiles to simply blast your message. Only posting about your business can easily be perceived as spam and irritate potential customers. Try peppering your overt marketing messages with news from industry leaders, updates meant to drive engagement (like questions, trivia, and other personal interactions), and unexpected entertainment (everyone likes a joke now and then). Above all, don’t be afraid to get creative and try new things. You won’t know what works until you know what doesn’t work, and that can change from day to day.

 

Obviously, this is just the tip of the social media iceberg, but following these three tips should help you move toward getting your feet with social marketing. For more concrete advice once you have your platforms chosen, your plan made, and you’re ready to move forward, check out the Hootsuite blog, or the Social Media Examiner.

 

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