These days, everyone has an Instagram account.

It’s a great platform to share images and content about your business to huge audiences at a low cost.

But if you’re navigating social media with your business, using banned hashtags be seriously detrimental to your account and to your business.

Technically you can get banned a lot of different ways, including:

• Sharing content you didn’t create or have no right to share.
• Posting content that contains nudity (specifically genitals, sex stuff, and close-ups of butts)
• Avoiding comments, likes, follows, or share by bots, and making repetitive contact with people for commercial purposes.
• Participating in hate groups, organized crime, and/or terrorism on Instagram.
• Advertising sexual services, buying and/or selling firearms, or illicit drugs.
• Blatant disrespect of other Instagram users. This includes shameful or degrading threats, or posting hate speech.
• Posting anything to do with self-inflicted injury.
• Posting graphic content of newsworthy events with no caption or warning about the content.

I assume your brand isn’t posting any hate speech, so you’re good there. But using banned hashtags are an insidious way to get your content flagged by Instagram. And you’d never expect that some of these hashtags are banned! There are more than 114,000 banned hashtags as of 2018. Have you been using any of them?

Instagram started banning hashtags because, well, people were getting spammy with them. Surprised? Neither are we.

When a certain hashtag starts to get used too broadly with content that violates their Community Guidelines, that hashtag can either temporarily or permanently be blocked.

In their guidelines, it reads: “Help us stay spam-free by not artificially collecting likes, followers, or shares, posting repetitive comments or content, or repeatedly contacting people for commercial purposes without their consent.”

If you use banned hashtags, you may get yourself shadowbanned. This means that Instagram will restrict the visibility of your content so that your posts don’t show up in searches or even in your followers’ feeds. So if you’ve noticed an unexplained dip in engagement recently, you may have been shadowbanned.

In some serious cases, using banned hashtags can get your entire account blocked. Banned hashtags can also essentially render your other hashtags on a post useless, making you invisible for the rest of the hashtags on your post.

You can see if you’ve been shadowbanned by clicking on any of the hashtags in your post. Then, check to make sure that your image appears in that hashtag’s feed. If it doesn’t, your post probably got shadowbanned.

Here’s a list of some of the banned hashtags on Instagram right now:

A

• adultlife
• alone
• asia
• assday
• attractive

B

• babe
• beautyblogger
• beyonce
• bikinibody
• boho
• books
• brain
• BadSugarMommyMakeover

C

• costumes
• curvy
• curvygirls

D

• dadylove
• date
• dating
• desk
• direct
• dm

E

• easter
• eggplant
• elevator

F

• fishnets
• fitnessgirls

G

• girlsonly
• gloves
• goddess
• graffitiigers

H

• hardworkpaysoff
• happythanksgiving
• humpday

I

• ig
• instamood
• iphonegraphy
• italiano
• instagood
• instadaily
• igers
• instagramhub

K

• kansas
• killingit
• kissing

L

• lean
• like
• lingerie

M

• master
• models
• mustfollow

N

• nasty
• newyears
• newyearsday

P

• petite
• popular
• pornfood
• pushups
• puppydogmondays

S

• sallyhansen
• saltwater
• shit
• shower
• single
• singlelife
• skype
• snap
• snapchat
• snowstorm
• sopretty
• stranger
• streetphoto
• sunbathing
• swole

T

• tag4like
• tanlines
• teens
• tgif
• thighs
• thought
• todayimwearing

U

• undies

V

• valentinesday

W

• woman
• womancrushwednesday
• women
• workflow
• wtf

Do you need social media experts to help to take your cannabis business to the next level? Our in-house specialists are experts in jumping through all of the social media hoops that you may not even know exist. Certain social media moves can seriously hurt your business, and not avoiding banned hashtags is one of them.

Get in touch today to hear about our social media services and what we can do for you. Our communications team can help you create, manage, and grow your social media influence with well-crafted and engaging content, promotions, campaigns, and tailored strategies just to your brand.

Which banned hashtag surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments section below!