There's been a lot of talk about marketing on HIVE of late. It's important - how would the world know how bloody great we are without it? There's not enough of us to do it via word of mouth, methinks, and it's pretty hard for us to explain to our circles. Many of us that do good things here can simply not afford marketing, or we aren't trained in marketing. We can only do the best we can with what we have.

Today, I've been working on what I can do, particularly with Natural Medicine. So I've been working with the community on a series of images that we can draw from to share on social media, such as our Twitter account and our new Instagram account @lotus.medicine. Please give us a follow on both if you have time.

Now I'm not a graphic designer and I know people aren't always fans of Adobe products, but I find Adobe Spark easy to use on my phone. I don't have time to learn anything more sophisticated and I need to produce these quickly. However, I'm quite pleased with what I could do - changing fonts, adding logos, editing out backgrounds and so on.

The first quote is really trying to get to the heart of what I think social media is about - sharing stories. I don't want to focus on the reward system as I don't want to set people up to believe they will be millionaires, having them get 0.01 cent on their first post and giving up. It's stories and community that make most of us stay anyway - everything else is secondary.

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When I asked in the Discord server for quotes or slogans or tag lines, I got an unexpected one from @cowboyblazerfan. I loved it! So simple. It could be a cannabis related advertisement on Twitter, or with a quick change of the background image, it could be used for a herbal post on Instagram. Either way I want to let people know all the kinds of things we welcome on the front end.

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I actually love it with capital letters - it feels bold and certain to me. Yeah, some folk DO grow plants - and that's freaking awesome.

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@fionafavourites suggested that was a bit shouty, suggesting we go for small caps. When I edited it from the original, I quite liked it. Much gentler, perhaps.

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This was also a pretty cool one, courtesy of @alchemage, who's been doing lots of behind the scenes thinking about how we can get www.naturalmedicine.io out there to the masses, or at least quite a few bubbles!

If you're wondering about the different sizes, some are Instagram sized, some are Facebook/Twitter sized. I've put them all in the #memestoshare channel in our Discord for anyone to use.

I also started to play with some of the old quotes that people gave me, although I need to change these now - get rid of the white background and change it to white letters instead. What do you think? Someone suggested that I get rid of the background entirely, but I really like the various lotus that of course connect to our token.

Thing is, I like it in big letters too. I guess as long as it's easily recognisable as one of our images in a branded kinda way, it doesn't matter so much, right? What do you think?

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I spent the entire afternoon playing with the Insta account so that it looked like something if anyone landed on it. There's a few tricks to Instagram I've learnt with my own account of 3k followers @wildtrackdreaming. I'm quite pleased with how it looks. I've gone and followed tons of #plantbased #yoga #herbalism people, and more to come. One of the tricks is to share their work as a story, drawing attention to the account in that way, so I've created a story highlight 'QUOTE LOVE' where I can share great wellness quotes from accounts that might end up finding their way to @lotus.medicine that way.

I've also found a few people that post reasonably often on in the community and shared their profiles as a story in the story highlight circle 'BLOGGERS'. I'm sharing some of their photos as well, crediting them with a link to their work as well in a kinda mutually beneficially way. So if you've got an appropriate Instagram account, please drop the link below or even if it's not #naturalmedicine related, do give us a follow anyway so we look kinda important, 'kay? :P - and if you're as HIVE passionate as we are, perhaps you could share one of our posts as a story yourself.

I'd love to get to the point where I feel confident enough to pay for promotion of our account on Instagram, perhaps with a Redbubble account for merch so that we look professional, but one of the problems is funding - we do a lot for HIVE and wellness is HUGE - a great opportunity for onboarding people via Natural Medicine - but we don't get a lot of support via delegation or whales. If you are able to help in anyway, particularly financially, do give me a shout. HIVE means so much to me and so many of us here - I'm just trying to do my best to shout it out to the world a little.