Do you follow a company on Instagram, but their posts do not show up in your feed? Or do you ever look up a company in search results and they do not show up? If that is the case, it is more than likely the company has been shadow banned. Being shadow banned means a company’s posts will show up in their own feed, but not in other’s feed. A lot of companies do not even know they are shadow banned because they do not get any notifications from the social media site.
What Does Being Shadow Banned Mean?
Being shadow banned means your social media posts do not show up in people’s feed. Even people that follow you will not be able to see your photos. Also, when you are shadow banned, your pictures will not show up in any hashtag feeds. That means any hashtags you post with your pictures are useless. When people look up your profile page in the search results, they will have to type in your full profile name in order to find it. Simply put, your profile is hidden from others, and no one can see the new activity on your page.
How to Fix it
How do you fix this issue? You fix it with a lot of luck and determination. You must contact customer service to see if they will reinstate your profile. It is typically a long process that does not get resolved quickly, or even at all. For that reason, many cannabis companies and online smoke shops have back up social media accounts just incase their primary account gets blocked or shadowed. It is a roll of the dice if you are going to get shadowed on social media. Some cannabis and smoke shop companies have social media pages that thrive, while others get shut down. It depends on what you post, how often you post, what hashtags your using, and how much activity you do.
What you Post
In our experience, posting our products with any cannabis related hashtags triggered our social media site to be shut down. To ensure you do not get shadow banned, you need to post appropriate content with user friendly hashtags. As mentioned above, this is a hard road to navigate because there are cannabis companies and smoke shops that thrive on social media by posting pictures of cannabis and other drug paraphernalia, while other companies get shadowed from it. You must be careful and try not post anything that will trigger alarms. Most times you will not get shadowed right away, but if you post enough pictures of them, you will get shadowed over time.
Amount of Posts
If you post multiple pictures daily on your business profile, you are most likely to get shadowed. Social media platforms keep track of the number of posts you do on your profile and if you are posting too often, social media platforms will think you are a spam account. You typically do not want to post more than 3 photos a day. Even that can sometimes be too much though. Just generally speaking, for cannabis companies and smoke shops it is best to limit the amount of social media posts you do.
#Hashtags
When posting on social media, you want to limit the amount of hash tags you use, as well as be careful of what ones you use. Using an excessive number of hashtags on a social media post can trigger your account to look like spam. Especially if you are using too many hashtags that do not fit your photo. You want to use hashtags that actually apply to the picture. You also want to avoid using super generic hashtags. For instance, if you post a picture of a smoking pipe and hashtag #live #life #great #fun #awesome, you are asking to be shadow banned. You also want to make sure you do not use the same hashtags often. When you use the same hashtags all the time on your account it could possibly be a cause to get shadowed.
Account Activity
You want to limit the amount of daily activity on your account. For example, it is common for a company to follow other users, so they can comment on posts and interact with their customers. By following too many people at a time, it can flag your account. If you are building your company account, it is not wise to go follow hundreds of people in one day. You want to slowly build up the amount of people you follow. It is also wise to limit the number of comments you make on people’s posts every day. Commenting a lot on people’s post can make your account seem like a spam account.
Kings Pipes Experience
It took us a while to figure it out, but unfortunately our company’s Instagram profile was shadowed by Instagram. Due to the reasons listed above, our social media accounts do not get viewed by our followers. It has been like this for our company for quite a while, and the problem was not able to be resolved. Having an online smoke shop or cannabis company that uses social media to advertise is hard.
Follow us on Social Media
We would definitely appreciate you to follow us on social media! Although we have been shadow banned on social media, we do still post updates about our store and new products dropping. You can follow us on Instagram here. We also participate in giveaways for our follows so if you are looking for a new bong or pipe, you might have a chance to win one! Since we have shadow banned, we have limited our giveaways on social media, but we intend to ramp them back up in the coming future.
New Social Media Cannabis Friendly Platforms
Being shadowed on social media has been a long-time problem for cannabis companies and smoke shops. To help combat this problem people have been working on creating cannabis friendly social media platforms that can be utilized by cannabis companies and smoke shops. It has been reported that cannabis entrepreneur Berner and the Weedmaps company have been working on a social media platform that is cannabis friendly. They made this announcement at the end of 2021. The platform has not launched yet, but it is expecting too soon.
Conclusion
Getting shadow banned on social media sucks. Social media can be such a great platform for companies to promote their brand and their products, and when you are no longer able to do that, it is devastating for business. It is especially hard for small company owners that have limited resources for advertising because being active on social media can be an efficient and cheap marketing strategy for them. When it is taken away, companies must look for other outlets to advertise, which can be costly and timely. Overall, you must be careful with your social media page if you are running a cannabis or smoke shop account. By taking precautions and being smart about the running the account page, it is possible to not get shadowed. Again though, there is no specific set of rules for getting shadowed. Some companies thrive while others get shut down. Sometimes it is just the roll of the dice.