🐚 The Salty Shell: How to Improve Your Sentiment, Spend & Strategy

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If you think community management is just about replying to comments and "building a community," think again.

I talk about community a lot (I will link all previous issues at the end) and I say it’s the backbone of my career or what I’m known for and it’s because I truly believe in it, have created it and have seen communities work for a variety of reasons but at the end of the day, everything seems to come back to community.

You won’t find me talking about memes and trends – as part of a strategy at least. You come to me for the marketing and social media foundational basics – which I’ve fought for a long time but after a lot of feedback and reflection, I now realize a lot of things I assume everyone knows how to do . . . they don’t. I assume foundational basics and I see that they’re being skipped, half-assed or overlooked and that’s not sustainable.

So, instead of ignoring the basics let’s master them.

🧂 Salty Insights: Is the job being done?

Overlooking critical insights that could transform your strategy, targeting, messaging and overall approach can:
• compromise your reputation
• distort your market perception
• waste resources and budget
• disrupt customer relationships
• lead to ineffective campaigns

I’m not going to get into the basics of community management, but I will say that if the basics were being covered, consistently and properly, the fact that these insights/possibilities exist wouldn’t be shocking.

Community management provides honest and raw feedback on:

• Paid targeting

• Brand and product perception

• Misconceptions

• Content inspiration

• Innovation/improvement

• Is the content resonating

If you are unaware of how your content is performing and what the sentiment around it, your brand and product/service is – what are you doing and why?

It’s shocking that clients don’t question this but at the same time a lot of agencies and people are pulling one over on clients. 💾The Secret to Social Media Reporting​

⚓️ Anchor Your Success: Engage, Analyze

What I see a lot of is brands and businesses that do have someone community managing their organic content, but not paid. Why? The comments on paid filter in just like organic whether you’re on the platform natively or getting fed alerts through a 3rd party.

The examples I’m going to walk you through are real examples from multiple CPG brands, and I won’t leave anything to your imagination since we are here to learn.

All of these examples are from paid social: boosted/promoted organic posts or 100% paid ads (awareness, traffic or conversion objectives) and the learnings and processes here are applicable to organic. I stumbled upon them as I am a consultant for an agency and am auditing all of their current strategies, reporting and workflows for each client. Having an outside/fresh POV is something every strategy and business could benefit from after a while because we get so set in our ways (and get busy) we don’t realize what might be overlooked.

I have seen a lot of agencies and brands launch paid and set it and forget it or just look at the numbers on the backend. I don’t understand why monitoring something you’re paying for and expecting positive results from is being ignored.

BRAND 1: OLIVE OIL

It all starts with copywriting (link to talked about that here) and some of these issues can be solved/eliminated by having clear, concise, and informational copy on each paid and organic post. If the post leaves people with questions and concerns, you’re going to hear about it in the comments.

Without getting too deep into copy, here’s my raw, immediate/gut reaction feedback: Caption: Open a world of new flavors with [brand name] [product name] - Open a world of new flavors, why would I want to do that? How do I do that? What are the flavors and how is [product name] going to do that? - Each product has the same caption and not only is the caption not good, how does the copy differentiate each product? It doesn’t - WHY should I buy THAT product? - The CTA is learn more. I don’t want to learn more about olive oil – tell me where to buy it.

Comments:

A natural community manager would be frustrated, mad or offended because it’s not fake, we don’t set the pricing (hello, inflation) and you’re only saying you use cold pressed because you saw a TikTok that’s not even accurate. This is your brand, your community and (if you care) you want it represented properly, you’re going to hide the comments and take notes.

The other problem here is that these comments are sitting on an ad that’s getting A LOT of impressions and is now distorting your brand perception, raising unnecessary red flags, and shows the brand doesn’t respond to questions or misinformation. People will legit have arguments and conversations about your products in the comments – why aren’t you there?

Now this is how you play strategist. I’m not going to tell you exactly what I recommended, but I will tell you how I got there.

I noticed the recurring negativity is around plastic bottles, origin, how it is or isn’t created, it’s been outed as fake, and it’s too expensive. You can hide these comments, address them directly, but you should go a step further and think about why you are getting these comments: - Lack of education: not school per se but education from you and other olive oil brands about olive oil. Your content should be addressing or at least including information about packaging, the origin of the olives/olive oil, if it’s cold pressed or not and why that matters or not. - Audience targeting: based on the volume of comments on affordability we should take a look at the ad targeting and see what adjustments need to be made. That could include interests, location, stores they shop, income and age. You probably won’t make content that addresses price points but you could create a series of how to get the most out of your bottle.

Positively, commenters and their families have been using this for years which shows loyalty, that it’s a staple in their homes and lives, it really is your grandma’s olive oil. So, what can you do with that? What should you do with that? Why isn’t that an angle? 👀

BRAND 2: FOODSERVICE

Foodservice is B2B and spans restaurants, cafes, bars, cafeterias, catering, institutions and the like. It’s your favorite CPG brands, but targeted to the above industries and operations managers, chefs, kitchen managers and etc.

The post: It’s about Summer dishes and how this brand has you covered and the video is a slideshow of summer meals made with this brand’s products.

The comments: literally every comment from the past 3 months (that’s as far back as I’ve looked) is one of these: yummy, looks delicious, amen, yum.

The DMs: “Why did you get rid of [canned soup from years ago]?” “My granddaughter likes to eat your chicken noodle soup when she’s sick”

Now think about who I said we are targeting. Do you think they are reaching their target audience? No, they’re wasting a shitload of money on an audience that is too broad and Meta is going to continue to serve the ad to people like the people commenting. The brand does not need or want this audience, so why is no one doing anything about it? Why isn’t the community manager raising the red flag and even saying something as simple as “it’s so annoying that people only post yummy or amen on our ads.”

So when your agency is reporting on engagement, engagement rate, reach, impressions and all those numbers people care about but don’t know why they care about them and you are happy because you see engagement and an increase in all the right places, why does it stop there?

Why are you not asking what the sentiment of the comments is? Why are you not asking how the creative and copy are performing? More importantly, why isn’t your agency telling you? (because they’re hiding the fact that they don’t do everything they’re supposed to be doing) You’re paying them to run ads to get you business but they’re reaching The Golden Girls.

Why aren’t the repetitive words and phrases that are consistently being left on your content not being auto hidden? 👀 👀

I could speak on this all day, and I’d be happy to talk to your team about this too, but really think on the questions I just asked and start there.

🌊 Brain Waves: Adapt

You (or someone else) have engaged, and then analyzed the content, comments and sentiment, and now it’s time to adapt. There are a lot of different ways you can approach this and how to work it into your community manager, team and company’s workflow. The community manager and the social team are not the only ones who should know what the people are saying.

Look at Comments & DMs

• What are the recurring themes: positive, negative and questions

• Why do people think that: misinformation, confusion, lack of education

• What opportunities do we have: content, packaging, messaging

• Who is engaging: target audience, consumers, haters, people other than the target audience

The strategy informs your content calendar. Your content calendar should resonate with your community and target audience. Reporting includes content performance, sentiment, recommendations, community highlights and informs the next content calendar.

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So, do you know what your community manager is doing? Do you know what your brand’s perception is? Are you over or underthinking your copy and content?

I love doing brand, team, workflow, strategy and performance audits. Reply if you want help digging deeper into yours.

Chelsea

Vote for next week's issue: How to get new content ideas whenever you need them Get rid of these 3 words and phrases in your copy Decks are meant to be seen and used more than once

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