I have a cannibis client who just wants more foot-traffic to the shop. His specifications is that the CTA button is “Get Directions”. I was reading the FB policies, Facebook - I was thinking we may be ‘violating’ 2, 5, 11, 14, 17 or 22… so I was just wondering if the cannibis industry was able to run ads?? I was thinking for images maybe a pic of the shop because the accessories / eletronics can’t be depicted.
Doesn’t say anything about Cannabis. While we think of many things when it comes to Adult products, I think this one may be explicitly what they say here.
Same thing, this one is about more hacking type devices. No difference in #11
I think #14 is where you get into gray areas… specially the wording " Products, including food or drinks, that make health or medical claims " - but you could make an argument that its neither food or drink depending on what the client is selling.
#17 is where you run into the issue of breaking FB policy if you sell the product. It specifically states marijuana. But my understanding on the wording “Products sold on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp must comply with our Commerce Policies” is that you have to sell it on FB. You’re not selling it on FB, you’re just using FB as basically a map to your shop. But I think you may still run into issues with doing cannabis ads.
Although what it all seems to boil down to is basically, you can’t promote anything relating to cannabis unless its educational. so you’re not direct selling to people, but educating them and based on that content they reach out to you in person.
Overall, I think based on the two linked articles above, you can’t run CTA buttons on “get directions”, but potentially run ads on educational content that gets you impressions on your name.
Kaz, thank you so much for those articles. I appreciate the links to those informative articles.
This is going to be a challenging case since I am playing the middle man here.
That’s a great idea, Phyllis!
This shop is actually trying to differentiate itself from its sister company that’s about 8 miles away, so Twitter could work out for them!
There’s a lot of great information in these articles and basically, for reference, the short answer to advertising cannabis on Facebook is - don’t bother trying it.
Too many people have had their ad accounts shut down completely for even trying to run cannabis-related ads on Facebook. As mentioned above, the only ads they’ll even consider are educational - and most of those won’t be approved either.
The best options are to focus on other platforms (LinkedIn is the most cannabis-friendly, and Twitter keeps changing their rules, so maybe now it’s allowed, and some are doing well on Reddit). Also, for digital, they want to primarily focus on organic (social) efforts, and local SEO marketing efforts are also useful.
Lastly, programmatic advertising platforms like TrafficRoots offer paid ads on cannabis-friendly sites. This can be a great option since it includes many of the same targeting options (geotargeting, behavioral targeting, etc) that non-cannabis programmatic advertising includes.
There’s a lot to consider when it comes to digital marketing and social media for cannabis companies, so hopefully this helps!
Hope this helps!