1/ How did we grow the @RESPAWNProducts brand to over 75,000 followers in just under 18 months without any planned social strategies or even a social team?

A thread with a bunch of random thoughts and insight on what we've done

2/ I joined RESPAWN in March 2019 to handle partnerships and sponsorships. Within the first week, I knew that the socials were not going to cut it.

We needed teams/influencers to want to work with us if we wanted to be a successful brand in the space (GFuel, Monster, RedBull).

3/ Within the first two weeks, we cut our agency partner and I took over all social media temporarily. What did this lead to?

- A natural voice, no more robotic/corporate posts.
- More frequent posts, going from a couple dozen tweets per month to a couple hundred.

4/ There was no pressure, no expectations, and no goals. Since social was not my main responsibility (at least on paper) it was more of the fun project than a real "job".

This led to the very organic and engaging voice the RESPAWN brand now has.

5/ There is no process or greenlighting of content for social, no walking - just running. Sometimes we strike out here since we're always swinging big but this has allowed us to always be a part of the conversation and on-trend.

6/ There are plenty of downsides to a no-strategy, one-person social team. The main one being that a lot of concepts we utilize don't scale with us long-term.

Like responding naturally to a bunch of tweets and creating unique 'relationships' with each individual follower.

7/ Sometimes we make posts that others would look at as 'irrelevant' to the brand. We're a part of the conversation though, our brand is top of mind and on someone's feed.

However, we're not a meme account so we've worked on finding a stronger balance there.

8/ Our growth has begun to slow down a bit compared to what we saw across all socials throughout 2019 BUT our engagement rate continues to climb.

The growth is slowing but brand loyalty is growing.

9/ We've been able to leverage awesome relationships with our partners, influencers, and even other brands within the space to create cool collaborative moments.

Sometimes other brands respond, sometimes they don't. We'll keep shooting our shot though.

10/ We love to use concepts from our partners, in a good way. One of our partners @KARNAGEClan runs 'recruitment challenges' in which members of the community can be recruited to the team.

What did we do? The exact same concept but to become a partnered creator with RESPAWN.

11/ The 'RESPAWN Recruits' strategy above led to one of our most successful social campaigns over the last few months, drove our engagement up, and allowed 10 awesome new creators to be brand 'partners'. (We don't have an open affiliate program).

12/ Authentic and honest communication, no corporate jargon.

You're upset and tweeting us that your shipment came in damaged? We'll respond and tell you the truth "it should not have happened" or "looks like someone messed up" and then we do our absolute best to fix it for you.

13/ Social media 'characters' are often referenced on our socials and some of the brand followers even know some of the RESPAWN employees by name.

We even get community members involved such as 'Chair Guy' (the guy who always responds asking for a free chair).

14/ Setting a bunch of "goals" for our followers to come together and "win" together is the biggest growth hack that has helped us succeed.

15/ Sometimes you make mistakes on purpose and that leads to amazing results.

Here is the closest thing we've had to a 'viral' moment and although we might have strung our followers along, 99% of them knew that it was a joke (and we even did give some free chairs away).

16/ Where do we stand?

Followers aren't the perfect metric but here is where we sit on each platform as of this thread:

Twitter: 36,000 Followers
IG: 16,000 Followers
FB: 8,500 Followers
TikTok: 7,000 Followers
YT: 6,000 Subscribers
Discord: 3,000 Members

17/ Where do we go from here?

Finding the same levels of success and growth as we have had on Twitter on other socials.

Keeping our authentic and natural voice while finding new strategies that will scale with us as we grow.

18/ A huge shoutout to @tobydoyhowell from @MorningBrew, @OliverAge24 from @FallGuysGame, and @mkobach from @fast for the inspiration on this thread.

Some of the best people in the space when it comes to social and marketing.

19/ An even bigger shoutout to @LordDagovere for working on the socials with me throughout the last year as a freelancer and absolutely killing it. We have exceeded all expectations and have successfully run six different social channels with a two-man team.