While much of the industry kept chasing polished marketing and safe social templates, cannabis culture on X stayed fast, funny and deeply online. Parker Beck and Swaroop Suri built Canna Connect by understanding that gap, and they think most brands still haven’t caught up.
Cannabis brands love talking about culture. Online, most of them still post like they’re making ads for a world that no longer exists.
The overly designed graphic. The cinematic ten-second intro. The “20% off today only” drop that lands in the timeline and disappears in half a second.
“The moment people see that, they recognize it as an ad and disengage,” says Swaroop Suri, co-founder of Canna Connect. “People don’t go on X to be sold to. They go to engage.”
That gap between how cannabis brands think they should market and how people actually use the internet is the entire reason Canna Connect exists.
The Platform Everyone Ignored
While legal cannabis operators spent years fighting for scraps on Instagram, tiptoeing around platform restrictions, using “gardening” as a euphemism for weed and watching accounts vanish overnight for posting a photo of flower, a different conversation was happening on X.
Cannabis culture never really left Twitter. It just kept going, faster and less filtered than anywhere else.
“On X, you have this newfound freedom to post those stunning photos of your flower, not be forced to use alluding lingo,” says Parker Beck, the other co-founder. “You have that freedom to show your customers the product you have put your heart into in its full glory.”
Beck has been building X accounts since 2013. He ran WeedVsAlcohol on Instagram, which peaked at around 400,000 followers before the platform cracked down. He had been running WeedPorns on X since 2014, posting steadily, watching the numbers tick up slowly, a thousand or two followers per month, without any clear signal that the platform was going to matter.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter, the algorithm shifted and everything changed.
“People don’t go on X to be sold to. They go to engage.”
Swaroop Suri, co-founder, Canna Connect
The Gordon Ramsay Moment
In 2022, Beck posted a joke. The premise: you’re high at work at your minimum-wage job and Gordon Ramsay walks in with a camera crew.
“At this point, I had managed 15-plus Twitter accounts over the last nine years,” Beck says, “and I had never seen the engagement and snowball effect that this tweet had.”
In 48 hours: 300,000 likes. 30,000 new followers. Beck had seen viral posts before. He had never seen one behave like this, the sustained growth, the ripple, the way the algorithm kept feeding it to new audiences.
“This was the moment that changed everything and I realized Twitter had a strong cannabis audience and the platform was accepting of this content.”
He immediately started reformatting his best Instagram content for X and committed to posting three or four times a day. Within a year, WeedPorns gained over 800,000 followers.
But follower growth was not the business. The business came later.
When Attention Became a Business
Beck ran a campaign for a smoking device company. Simple setup: a video, an engaging caption, a product link in the threaded replies. No cinematic intro. No professional studio. No designed graphics with promo codes.
The post generated 25 million impressions and 50,000 link clicks.
“This was the moment it clicked for me that this audience I had built wasn’t just there for the funny memes,” Beck says. “They were active consumers of cannabis products.”
Suri had come at it from the brand side. He had built and run Melee Dose, a hemp-derived cannabinoid brand, and had experienced firsthand how restrictive the digital landscape was for cannabis companies. He had also watched WeedPorns drive traffic and consumer action for Melee Dose in a way that felt completely different from what other platforms were offering.
Together, they founded Canna Connect.
“This was the moment it clicked for me that this audience I had built wasn’t just there for the funny memes. They were active consumers of cannabis products.”
Parker Beck, co-founder, Canna Connect
What Brands Still Get Wrong
The list of mistakes, according to both founders, is consistent and recognizable.
High Times Field Guide
What actually works on the platform, and what gets scrolled past. Based on Canna Connect and WeedPorns.
Conversation-first text postsAsk a question, share an opinion, start a debate. Text outperforms visuals on X more often than brands expect.
iPhone video with a tight captionRaw and real beats polished and produced. A 30-second clip shot on a phone can pull 25M impressions. A cinematic brand intro will not.
Product links in threaded repliesLead with content that earns attention. Drop the link in the thread after people are already engaged.
Memes tied to real cultural momentsInternet-native humor that doesn’t need your logo on it. If it makes people share it, that share does the branding.
Showing the product directlyOn X, you can actually show flower, talk openly about effects and post what Instagram would take down. Use that freedom.
Posting consistently at volumeThree to four posts per day keeps you in the algorithm. Brands that post once a week are invisible.
The “20% off today only” graphicOverdesigned promo drops read as ads instantly. People disengage before they finish reading.
The cinematic brand introNobody is watching your ten-second logo reveal. The scroll has already moved on by second three.
Treating X like InstagramX is conversation, not a feed of beautiful images. Polished visual content built for Instagram rarely translates.
Forcing memes into sales momentsSeizing on a viral moment and turning it into a product push kills the joke and the trust simultaneously.
Imitating internet culture without understanding itBrands that try to “do memes” without being genuinely online are immediately visible. The community notices every time.
Selling in every postIf every piece of content is an ad, none of it is culture. You can build name recognition without a CTA. Most brands don’t try.
The biggest one is overproduction. “Many cannabis brands are stuck in the old days of marketing and want the highly produced professional videos that used to make your brand appear luxurious,” Beck says. “The truth is, attention spans have drastically changed and nobody is watching your cinematic 10-second intro.”
Some of their most effective campaigns, Suri says, were shot on iPhones with an engaging caption or Snapchat-style text. Not because production quality doesn’t matter, but because what people respond to now is authenticity. “A quick iPhone video can outperform something that took two weeks to produce, simply because it feels real and native to how people consume content now.”
The second mistake is treating every post like a sales moment. Beck points to Wendy’s and Ryanair as brands that understood this: a viral moment doesn’t need to be converted into a sales opportunity to have value. Sometimes the residue of attention is the point.
“You are able to build a community without having to sell them every chance you get,” he says.
The third mistake is misunderstanding meme culture. Suri says brands fail in one of two ways: they dismiss memes as unserious and low-effort, or they try too hard to imitate internet culture without actually being part of it. Both get it wrong.
“Meme culture moves fast and it’s very intuitive,” he says. “You can’t fake it or overthink it. It comes from actually being online, understanding how people talk, and knowing what feels natural in a feed.”
“You can’t fake it or overthink it. It comes from actually being online, understanding how people talk, and knowing what feels natural in a feed.”
Swaroop Suri, co-founder, Canna Connect
Virality Is Not the Same as Value
One distinction Beck makes, and it gets lost in most conversations about social media, is the difference between a post that blows up and then disappears and content that leaves a lasting impression.
“There is a huge difference between content that goes viral and the moment is over vs viral content that leaves a lasting impression and resonates with the viewer,” he says.
On X, that often looks less like advertising and more like participation. Name recognition built slowly through consistent, culturally fluent posting. The goal is not a single spike. It’s trust.
The Risk Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Building a business almost entirely around one platform is a real bet, and both founders acknowledge it.
“X, like every social media platform, comes with its inherent risks,” Beck says. “One small tweak to the algorithm could change your entire brand and content strategy.”
In cannabis specifically, there is an additional layer: the ever-present possibility that an account gets hit, even on a platform that is currently more permissive than most. “In the cannabis industry, you wake up every day wondering if today is the day your account gets taken down.”
Their counter is that the risk/reward on X still tilts in their favor compared to the alternatives. They are not pretending the risk doesn’t exist. They are just betting the eggs are safer in this particular basket.
Where It Goes Next
Suri’s view on where cannabis culture online heads from here is straightforward: it accelerates.
As regulations loosen and interstate commerce becomes less complicated, cannabis marketing budgets will grow. Brands will start competing nationally for attention, not just locally. When that happens, content and distribution become the differentiator, not just having a good product.
“The brands that win will treat content and culture as core strategy, not just an afterthought,” he says.
Beck puts the closer case plainly. WeedPorns works, he says, because it stays true to itself as a driver of cannabis culture, advocacy, humor and trends, constantly evolving with its audience while adapting to cultural shifts without losing its core.
Most cannabis brand accounts don’t do that. They try to be something they’re not.
The industry is catching up. It just hasn’t finished catching up yet.
Canna Connect is available at cannaconnect.agency. WeedPorns on X: @WeedPorns.
