Smoke Signals: Why Cannabis Brands Need Social Media to Amplify Marketing Tactics

As the meme goes, “We’re cannabis brands, of course we want to use social media.” As of 2023, 61.4% of the world's population uses social media, and the number of social media users has more than doubled since 2015. That’s a mind-boggling large addressable audience for brands in every industry.

However, anyone who has tried to find cannabis social media content—or actually produce it themselves—has likely discovered that this is one industry where advertising restrictions, lingering stigma and a patchwork of state and federal laws doesn’t work in brands’ favor. 

Despite those challenges, most marketers and executives would agree that cannabis brands can’t really afford not to be on social media. It occupies a unique place in between owned, earned and paid media that other channels simply can’t match—and it’s where most of us spend a significant part of our days whether on or off the clock. 

When cannabis brands take a smart, strategic approach to social media, they stand to make huge wins in brand recognition and messaging, as well as consumer education and loyalty. Here’s why the right cannabis social media is so necessary:

Does Social Media Fall Under Owned Media or Earned Media for Cannabis Brands?

For brands in most industries, social media sits somewhere in between owned, earned and paid media. Many marketers count social platforms like Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, X, and YouTube as an extension of their owned media strategy for a few reasons. 

For one, these are channels where you can post and publish what you choose, on your schedule. Often, brands are adapting other owned media content they have already produced like blogs, white papers and case studies to share on social media. 

For another, posting content to a brand’s social media accounts doesn’t require earning that coverage by pitching story ideas to a journalist, submitting thought leadership op-eds to editors of cannabis trade publications and other outlets or crafting news releases. 

Cannabis brands posting on social media, however, are often up against the terms of service dictated by the parent companies of popular platforms. In particular, Meta and ByteDance, which own Facebook / Instagram and TikTok, respectively, have strict policies designed to prevent the sale of illegal goods on their apps—and that includes cannabis, despite state legalization. 

The algorithms that serve and moderate the massive amounts of content on these platforms are also designed to protect minors from content related to cannabis and other psychoactive substances. That’s one reason cannabis marketers often approach social posting more like an earned media exercise than straight up owned media. 

What Are Social Media Restrictions for Cannabis Brands?

When you can’t share images of common products like cannabis flower or plants, depict consumption or even use certain words—or cannabis hashtags—like weed, marijuana, dope, ganja or reefer without getting shadowbanned, cannabis marketers have to get creative in how they earn and maintain good standing on social platforms.

One robust branch of the modern social media landscape has plenty of overlap with paid media: influencer marketing. Cannabis influencers increasingly partner with brands to demonstrate new consumption devices, review products from concentrates to edibles, and promote events and strategic partnerships. 

Influencer marketing has a lot of appeal for cannabis brands for a few reasons. One, it’s the influencer who runs the risk of getting shadowbanned or being disincluded in search results when they discuss cannabis on their social media channels. Two, consumers often trust word of mouth from fellow tokers and cannabis enthusiasts over direct marketing from brands, at least initially. Three, influencers often have an established audience and broad reach that can take a brand years of dedicated effort to match, broadening brand awareness at an accelerated rate.

Of course, traditional paid media is also possible through social media. In fact, it can be easier and less risky for cannabis brands to run paid ads on certain social media channels that explicitly allow such activity than on more traditional paid media platforms like Google Ads. Early in 2023, for example, X announced paid cannabis ads would be allowed on the platform formerly known as Twitter for the first time. LinkedIn is also a particularly cannabis-friendly social network, in part due to its older user base.

How Legacy Vs. Licensed Cannabis Brands Use Social Media

Of course, advertising restrictions haven’t stopped plenty of both legacy and legal cannabis brands from posting where their target audience—who spends an average of two hours a day or more on social media—is most likely to be spending their time. 

Indeed, in February of 2024 a coalition of five New York State cannabis industry groups called on Gov. Kathy Hochul to do more to regulate unlicensed cannabis operators that advertise on social media and search engines like Google. 

The open letter highlights the bind in which licensed cannabis companies frequently land—caught between social media platforms’ advertising restrictions and terms of service, and competition from legacy competitors that are successfully skirting those limitations.

The industry groups cited concerns not only about unfair competition but also that these social channels might be used to spread misinformation about cannabis that could be harmful from both a public health perspective and a stigma perspective. After all, PR for cannabis businesses is PR for the cannabis industry as a whole.

You might also enjoy: Is Threads the Next Big Social Media Platform for Cannabis Brands?

Consumer Education and Cannabis Social Media

What is cannabis marketing doing differently than other business sectors? Increasingly, the answer to that question looks like consumer education through cannabis-fluent brand messaging. After decades of anti-drug messaging and a dearth of quality scientific research on cannabis, the majority of American adults who believe cannabis should be legal are hungry for the objective truth about recreational use of this plant, but also how cannabis fits into health, wellness and natural lifestyles.

Whether brands are speaking to a B2B audience or B2C, consumer education content is one of the best ways to raise public awareness about cannabis science, safe consumption and what to look for in quality cannabis products, such as third-party testing. Social media is one of the best ways to share that consumer education content far and wide in tandem with a robust PR strategy.

The Power of Social Listening Through Cannabis Social Media

Cannabis social media content is also a useful tool for stakeholders, including government agencies and officials, to get a realistic sense of public sentiment around the plant and its legal status. In fact, a 2024 report from the Food and Drug Administration noted that the FDA’s six-month review that led to its recommendation that cannabis be rescheduled, “involved manually analyzing hundreds of posts on publicly available online/social media platforms to provide context directly from users regarding marijuana.”

The FDA was interested in learning how consumers perceive cannabis “effectiveness for several therapeutic purposes such as anorexia, anxiety, nausea, and pain; nonmedical purposes; benefits and negative effects [and] experiences with access.”

Of course, federal regulatory bodies aren’t the only ones that can use social media as part of a broader social listening strategy. Social media is hugely valuable to cannabis brands for outbound marketing and posting content that will convert customers and draw leads into the sales funnel. 

But social media is equally valuable as a way to gather data that can be used for audience segmentation, to refine brand messaging and to better quantify brand awareness and brand sentiment. Social listening can be used to collect social proof like testimonials and reviews, to build media relationships for proactive pitching and even to head off a potential communications crisis.

As you can see, social media matters for cannabis brands for a wide range of reasons. Neither earned nor owned media, neither the province of just marketing or PR, social media is in a class by itself. The search feature in social media platforms like TikTok is increasingly used in lieu of traditional search engines like Google. In the years ahead, that user practice could dramatically change the way brands approach their cannabis SEO strategy and keywords. 

Building a strong social media presence is key for cultivating invaluable expertise, authority and trust (EAT) in the minds of new and existing customers. But in addition to establishing credibility, it’s equally important for cannabis brands to stay compliant to avoid shadowbanning or even exposure for future state and federal lawsuits as the legal landscape around cannabis continues to evolve. 

Grasslands’ brand launch package includes a social media primer to set up your team for success right out of the gate. And we offer a range of additional services that will complement your in-house social media efforts as part of a broader cannabis marketing and PR strategy. Those include:

• Foundational brand messaging 
• Message mapping for audience segmentation
• Marketing automation
• Limited and full scope public relations support

Ready to talk about how to get started on your annual marketing plan? Reach out to Grasslands today to begin differentiating and growing your brand.