This post is the fourth in a five part series called “From the Bottom of the Freezer to Top of Mind” that provides a social media case study for a national brand that entered the realm of social media in 2013 with no prior presence. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5 here.

Michelina’s is a nationally-distributed frozen food brand based out of Minneapolis, but had no social media presence before coming to Spyder Trap in late 2012. Through a combination of new responsive website design, paid online advertising and organic social media engagement we were able to not only establish the brand on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels, but were able to make the brand relevant in a crowded digital space.

Social Media Monitoring Doesn’t Stop When the Research Does

A key aspect of our social media strategy for Michelina’s was listening and responding to consumers. While we had already spent time listening to existing social media mentions during our initial research phase, we understood that monitoring that social media conversation couldn’t stop once we had our initial data. Community management for any brand requires ongoing listening and monitoring in order to fully have a sense of what your online audience is thinking.

Pro tip: Social media monitoring can’t stop after the initial research phase.

Community Management is Not Just a Buzzword

After establishing that conversations about the brand were already occurring on Twitter and that those users would require an altered approach in tone, the real community management work began.

However, there are many misconceptions about community management. Many brands believe that scripted and prewritten content is all that’s needed to effectively manage your social media audience.

While that planned and scheduled content is still useful, their needs to be flexibility with your content calendar. Social media moves fast, and as a brand you need to move just as fast in order to stay current with the online conversation. This means that effective community management requires daily attention to watch for brand mentions and user comments. You can’t respond to the mentions if you’re not watching for them.

Despite the amount of work involved, community management can be a great way to enhance and supplement your social media strategy. With the listening campaign we set up on Twitter, we were able to find existing conversations about Michelina’s that were already taking place. These untagged mentions were people talking about Michelina’s with no idea that the brand was now on Twitter.

From a community management standpoint, engaging these users was a no brainer. This was taking advantage of low hanging fruit by reaching out to people who were already saying positive things about the brand.

Building the Brand, One Tweet at a Time

This community management strategy became a grassroots effort to build rapport with users. It also allowed Michelina’s to build their following organically without having to rely solely on Twitter paid advertising.

This one-on-one engagement was not only important for our social media strategy, but was a low risk/high reward opportunity. Because messages were only going to one user at a time, a tweet that wasn’t well-received wasn’t likely to cause a larger issue. This gave us more creative freedom to come up with more interesting responses to users’ untagged mentions.

What we found was that these response messages really resonated with users. Users were favoriting and replying to our responses, and were retweeting them out to their own audiences. Even more interesting was how often other users would retweet and favorite our responses. This meant that these conversations, which started between our brand one other user, were being noticed and appreciate by others.

With so many brands using Twitter and Facebook solely as a vessle for customer service or to broadcast product information, we were able to offer something unique for our audience. Humor and engagement became our distinguishing factor from competitors, and that approach has been validated by our fans.

Case Study Part Four Recap:

1. Making small adjustments to your social media strategy can save time in the long run
2. Responding to untagged mentions is a good way to leverage people already talking about your brand.
3. Creating content that resonates with users is still the most valuable thing a brand can offer

Up Next In Part Five

In the last post in this From the Bottom of the Freezer to Top of Mind series, I’ll provide the final lesson we learned from this experience, about the impact social media can have on your bottom line through web traffic and you email database.