40 Cannabis Hashtags to Enhance Your Content Marketing Strategy

Updated March, 2024

Social media management isn't one of the cannabis marketing products we offer at Grasslands—but in the age of Web 2.0, it is an essential tool for promoting your brand's owned and earned media efforts. A strong presence on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram is key for connecting your current audience and potential leads with the blogs, white papers, web copy and gated content on which your team has worked so hard. And discoverability tools like hashtags are a key tool brands and users alike utilize to find one another.

The truth is, however, that cannabis hashtags have been a blessing and curse for many in the industry. On one hand, hashtags have become the primary means to share information about a particular topic widely on most platforms, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok and LinkedIn. If a particular hashtag goes viral, as #Rhianna and #pregnant did during the singer’s 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, it can grant accounts invaluable visibility.

But cannabis hashtags can also alert algorithms and content moderation personnel to accounts in violation of a platform’s terms of service. Using common hashtags like #cannabis, #weed, #marijuana and #hash has been a fast-track to getting shadowbanned or shut down for many cannabis brands. The risk of violating cannabis advertising restrictions simply isn’t worth it to many marketing teams who, in another industry, would happily use social media to promote earned and owned content far and wide.

After all, we live in an era when 31% of adults say they are “almost constantly” online and when younger generations now use social media in lieu of traditional search engines. Even if social media isn’t the primary focus of your cannabis content marketing efforts, leaving it out of the mix entirely can leave you at a disadvantage versus more dialed-in competitors. So how can you use cananbis hashtags without ending up in the dog house? Here's what you need to know:

Why Cannabis Hashtags Take Finesse

Intuitive hashtags like #weed, #marijuana and #stoners can do more harm to brands than good. The most common terms for cannabis are easily flagged by social media and search engine algorithms and can result in your profile being shadowbanned. That's what it's called when your profile is still technically active but your posts never make it into the feeds of even your most engaged followers— or outright removed from the platform. 

Clever cannabis influencers and brands have turned to sneakier hashtags like #ouid and #wəəd to get around algorithm limitations. These creative workarounds are not unlike the shorthand cannabis enthusiasts employed throughout prohibition to communicate about weed with like-minded consumers. Just look at 420, one of the most enduring and well-recognized memes to come out of cannabis culture since federal prohibition was enacted in 1970. 

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These days, even #420 is a little too mainstream to skirt the eagle eye of social media companies’ terms of service. But new holidays have emerged with their own attendant lingo such as #710. That’s the concentrates-specific holiday that comes around each July, so named because the numbers 710 are an anagram for OIL. 

Many cannabis brands have capitalized on how fast cannabis slang emerges and evolves—using terms for different types of concentrates like wax, shatter, rosin and crumble, for example. Others have enough overlap with other kinds of frequently shared subject matter, like unboxing videos or product reviews, that they’re harder to outright ban, even if moderators have caught on.

Some hashtags that you might expect to be totally saturated with weed content have actually been coopted by other enthusiasts with tongue firmly in cheek. Search #reefermadness on Instagram, for example and you'll find a mix of posts about the seminal 1930s anti-drug propaganda film, the early aughts cult classic Reefer Madness: The Musical, as well as colorful photos of coral reefs and graffiti-coated train cars.

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Cannabis Emoji

The rise of emojis, too, has given cannabis enthusiasts new ways to talk undercover about their favorite plant. While there is no official weed emoji, those who partake have adopted the sprout, broccoli, tree and alembic emojis as symbols of flower, concentrates and other consumables. Despite corporate censorship, these reference points have even gotten baked into the subculture of prominent social media platforms, sometimes in surprising ways. 

You might expect the /trees sub-Reddit, for example, to be an online meeting place for dendrophiles (that’s Latin for tree fans) and botany enthusiasts to share information about various deciduous and evergreen species. But it was co-opted by cannabis fans who, thanks to prohibition, have become accustomed to talking about dank buds in coded terms. 

(Affable fans of actual poplars, oaks, aspens and myrtles turned around and made their own sub-Reddit, /marijuanaenthusiasts, where you are free to chat about much larger, more squirrel-friendly species than sativas and indicas.)

The Future of Cannabis Hashtags

In early 2023, Twitter shook up the status quo by announcing it would now allow licensed cannabis brands to purchase advertising on the platform. While it will take more than currently cash-strapped cannabis brands to turn around the post-Elon Musk platform's advertising revenue, cannabis brands and Twitter competitors alike took note. One thing that's interesting is that some of the “Twitter killer” platforms vying for former tweeters fed up with Elon Musk’s changes are sidestepping the issue of discoverability entirely.

Meta’s Threads, for example, eschews keyword searches and hashtags—despite the degree to which users, influencers and advertisers alike have come to depend on these tools. Not only that, with Threads Meta seems to be doubling downon the notoriously cannabis-unfriendly flavor of the Instagram platform. While Instagram will warn you that a “marijuana” or “psilocybin” search result “may be associated with the sale of drugs,” Threads flat out refers users to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) when they search for such substances.

Another nascent Twitter alternative, BlueSky has yet to roll out hashtags and hasn't made it clear if it ever will. Meanwhile, Mastodon is hashtag-heavy, using the discoverability feature to help users connect across the decentralized structure of the platform.

The Best Cannabis Hashtags

So what are some of the freshest cannabis hashtags cannabis fans are using to give Big Brother the slip? The answer to that question is always evolving along with social media algorithms and the awareness of human moderators. While we’d hate to ruin the fun by narcing, here are a few cannabis hashtags that will send you in the right direction:

1. #cannabiscommunity
2. #cannabisculture
3. #ouid
4. #weedporn
5. #weedstagram
6. #cannabiscures
7. #cannabissociety
8. #cannabisheals
9. #hempmymedicine
10. #cannabisphotography
11. #plantmedicine
12. #cannabislife
13. #hempheals
14. #cannabisoil
15. #fueledbyTHC
16. #cannabisdaily
17. #dailydabs
18. #cannabisindustry
19. #successfulstoner
20. #cannabisgrow
21. #dankmemes
22. #cannabismedicinal
23. #dankdank
24. #cannabislifestyle
25. #cannabisseeds
26. #fourtwenty
27. #cannabisclub
28. #ganjagirls
29. #cannabis420
30. #cannabiseducation
31. #differentleaf
32. #cannabisismedicine
33. #ouieed
34. #cannabislove
35. #ouidlife
36. #cannabisconnoisseur
37. #420fam
38. #710society
39. #growlife
40. #cannadaily

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