Social Butterfly: Cannabiz Academy’s Social Media Guide

Chris from Cannabiz Academy doesn’t waste time easing you in. His message is blunt: you can pour money into your website, packaging, trademarks, accounting, legal structure, and networking, but if your social media isn’t dialed in, none of it matters. In the flower and concentrates world, trust is built in public. If you don’t show up on people’s feeds, you don’t exist to them.

The video frames social media not as marketing, but as infrastructure. It’s where credibility is tested, where impersonators and scammers lurk, and where platforms can pull the rug out from under you without warning. Chris walks through the major platforms and their real utility—not the fantasy version people sell in courses.

X (Twitter) gets credit for being the least restrictive. The platform rewards strong opinions and clear positioning. Chris argues that controversy isn’t a liability—it’s fuel. Pick a side, especially on divisive topics like THCA, and engagement follows. Polarization creates comments, arguments, and visibility, which the algorithm loves.

YouTube is positioned as long-term memory. Founder stories, behind-the-scenes footage, event recaps, and vlogs live there as evergreen proof that your brand is real. The platform may age-gate content, but takedowns are rare. When people search your name months or years later, this is where they decide whether you’re legitimate.

Snapchat is acknowledged but deprioritized. It works if your audience already lives there and is best suited for one-to-one interaction, not scale.

TikTok is treated cautiously. It’s easy to grow fast, but hard to convert that attention into real customers. Heavy censorship means you have to speak in code, and monetization doesn’t always follow reach.

LinkedIn is framed as a business-only tool. Not for customers, but for investors, operators, and supply-chain partners—especially outside the U.S.

Instagram sits at the center of everything. Chris calls it the most powerful and most dangerous platform. Everyone uses it daily, which makes it unavoidable. At the same time, it’s plagued with impersonators, fake accounts, ransom-style recovery scams, and arbitrary takedowns. Losing accounts isn’t an anomaly—it’s part of the job. Backup accounts, documentation, and redundancy are survival tactics, not paranoia.

He closes with practical advice: document every username, email, and phone number tied to accounts; keep backup profiles; archive every post; follow and engage within your niche; stay consistent; and build a team because no one scales social alone. The takeaway is clear—social media is a grind, but opting out is not an option.

Source: Cannabiz Academy, YouTube – social media strategy and platform breakdown

Personal Experience

I’m on my eighth Instagram account.

The first hit 2,500 followers, then 1,800, 2,100. The next few barely survived before getting erased.

The current account is sitting at roughly 15,000 followers with over 4 million views.

Losing an account hurts—its like losing your voice, as well as the audience you built something with. But here’s the part that doesn’t show up in analytics dashboards: if people actually care, they’ll look for you.

Every time an account went down, my website searches spiked. People Googled the handle. They tried to find the page. They landed on my site. When a new account came online, those same people were the first to follow again. That’s the difference between an audience and a crowd.

A few lessons you only learn the hard way:

Don’t tie multiple accounts to the same email or password. When one goes down, you risk losing all of them. Compartmentalize everything.

When starting fresh, don’t post randomly. Target a market intentionally. Post content that speaks directly to that region or community.

Find accounts with real, organic followings in the 10–20k range. From there, follow only users with active stories. Active stories mean active humans—not bots, not abandoned accounts. Instagram limits how many people you can follow in a window, which is exactly why precision matters.

Example:

When I wanted traction in New York, I posted New York–specific content and memes, followed a handful of legitimate local accounts like @thenewyorkcannabistimes, and then selectively followed their active followers.

Inside that process, actually click through profiles. Look at what people are into. Music, cars, fitness, art, food—the overlap with flower culture is endless and genuinely interesting. This is where you stop being a brand and start being a person. Engage without pitching. Comment without selling.

As for platforms:

LinkedIn is the only place I engage consistently. It’s the hotel bar of the internet. Most conversations will annoy you. A lot of people overshare. But every once in a while, you make a business connection that actually lasts—and those are worth the noise.

YouTube is for you first. Make the content you want to see. If you try to make content for everyone else without a plan, burnout comes fast. Treat it like an archive, not a performance.

The reality is this: accounts will get taken down. That’s not hypothetical. The goal isn’t to avoid it forever. The goal is to build something portable—an audience that remembers you, searches for you, and follows you again.