Episode 500Social MediaCommunity BuildingContent Strategy

How to take over a social community you did not build, with Van Raynor

Van Raynor, Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares, walks through what to do in the first weeks after you take over a social community someone else built, which is the normal situation for almost every social media professional rather than the exception. He starts with a snapshot of the platforms: average reach, the campaigns your predecessor ran, the growth rate, the attrition rate, and, most importantly, how the page has actually been used over the years, whether as a broadcast channel, a customer support channel, or a sales channel. With that base of knowledge he compares the reality of the page against the goals or KPIs he was handed and decides whether they are feasible or need adjusting, because the community may be on a completely different diet of content than the outcome the organization now wants. He reads the community by looking for patterns in the analytics, specifically in what people comment on and react to, the way a litter and recycling PSA campaign revealed one patriotic audience and one recycling audience that he then served by posting upcycled Americana, and the way Americares posts featuring staff on site during a response reliably lift likes and comments. When the organization's focus shifts and the content mix has to change with it, he shifts it gradually using a concept he was taught called vegetables and desserts, where vegetables are the must-hit posts like donate now, sales messages, and major updates, and desserts are the vibe posts that build the brand, and he finds the balance by watching volume and metrics, which is why the Americares organic team runs campaign sprints alongside a larger paid push rather than posting every day. His tactical close is to take a deep breath, look back at the data, content, and campaigns, then ask whether the actions the community naturally takes ladder up to the KPIs or whether you need to change behavior or attract a new audience, then make a plan, stick to it, and test and learn.

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Van Raynor

Van Raynor

Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares

14 min

Key Takeaways

  • 1Inheriting a community is the normal case, not the exception: unless you joined a brand new startup or were hired to launch a platform the company has never been on, there is already an established presence with history attached, so the first move is to take stock of the platforms rather than to start posting.
  • 2The snapshot has five parts: average reach, what campaigns your predecessor ran, the growth rate, the attrition rate, and, more important than any of those, how the page has actually been used over the years, whether it has served as a broadcast channel, a customer support channel, or a sales channel.
  • 3Once you know how the page really behaves, hold the goals or KPIs you were handed up against it and decide out loud whether they are feasible this quarter or this year, because the community as it exists today may not be built to produce the intended outcome yet, since it may be on a completely different diet of content.
  • 4Find what the community cares about by looking for patterns in the engagement, not just the totals: a litter and recycling PSA campaign turned out to have one deeply patriotic audience and one recycling audience so detailed they would correct the plastic number in a photo, so Van posted upcycled Americana to serve both, while at Americares any post showing staff on site during a response reliably lifts likes and comments.
  • 5Balance the mix by watching volume and metrics rather than by rule: the Americares organic team runs campaign sprints, several posts over a few weeks alongside a larger paid push, shared during heat moments or when a topic is live, because posting every day produced diminishing returns on post metrics and click-throughs, and the tolerance differs by channel, with eight posts over four weeks fine on one page and a dip showing after as few as four on another.

About this episode

Most social media managers never build the community they run. They inherit it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Van Raynor, Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares, walks through what to do in the first weeks after you take over a page someone else built. He starts with the snapshot: average reach, the campaigns your predecessor ran, growth rate, attrition rate, and whether the page has really been used as a broadcast channel, a customer support channel, or a sales channel. Then he compares that reality against the KPIs you were handed and decides whether they are feasible or need adjusting. Van also shares the vegetables and desserts framework he was taught, where vegetables are the posts you have to hit and desserts are the vibe posts that build the brand. He explains why a community fed ice cream for years will ask where the ice cream went the day you serve broccoli, and why the organic team at Americares runs campaign sprints instead of posting daily. If you have just walked into a community you did not build, this is your first-month plan.

Topics covered

  • Taking a snapshot of an inherited page
  • Testing handed-down KPIs for feasibility
  • Finding audience patterns in the comments
  • Vegetables and desserts content mix
  • Organic campaign sprints over daily posting

Notable quotes

“For many social media professionals, when you get in your job, you're usually inheriting a social community.”

— Van Raynor(01:33)

“Imagine your whole diet is ice cream every day. Maybe different flavors occasionally, but it's ice cream. For years perhaps. Then one day you get broccoli. Interesting. Is it good? Is it bad? Some people might love it. Some people will say, where's my ice cream?”

— Van Raynor(06:51)

“We share them out during our heat moments or when it's topical, but we aren't going out every day on the organic side because we will see diminishing returns on our post metrics and click-throughs.”

— Van Raynor(09:03)

“Do the actions your community naturally takes ladder up to your KPIs? Or do you need to create a change in behavior? Or do you need to attract a new group of people that reflect the organization's current direction?”

— Van Raynor(10:39)

Resources mentioned

  • Framework

    The Inherited Community Snapshot

    Before you publish anything, take stock of the platforms you just inherited. Pull the average reach, the campaigns your predecessor ran, the growth rate, and the attrition rate, then answer the question Van treats as more important than any single stat: how has this page actually been used over the years? A page run as a broadcast channel behaves nothing like one run as a customer support channel or a sales channel, and the answer sets the ceiling on what you can ask of the audience next. The point of the snapshot is not the report itself, it is having a base of knowledge in hand before you look at your goals and decide where you are taking the page.

  • Playbook

    Reading What a Community Actually Cares About

    Go back into the analytics and hunt for patterns in the engagement of your content rather than in the topline numbers. Read what people comment on and what they react to, and name the audiences those patterns reveal. On a PSA campaign about keeping the United States clean and litter free, Van found two: one deeply patriotic group, and one group of recycling enthusiasts so far into the details that they would point out a photo showed plastic number one rather than plastic number four. He then wove both strengths together by looking for upcycled Americana, like an American flag made out of water bottles or old road signs turned into a sculpture. Not every community is that specific, and the signal can be much plainer: at Americares, posts showing staff on site during a response or at a project location always bump likes and comments, because people followed the page to see something done.

  • Framework

    Vegetables and Desserts

    This is a concept Van was taught, not one he invented, and it is how he shifts a content mix without losing the audience. Vegetables are the posts you have to hit: the donate now message, the sales message, the major updates, the content that carries your KPIs. Desserts are the vibe posts, the brand building, the fun and light-hearted material, the campaign post with the huge celebrity or the meme you jumped into, anything that is not a direct buy now or donate now ask. You need both, and you find the balance by watching the volume and the metrics of the must-share posts rather than by picking a ratio in advance. If the organization's focus has changed and the mix has to change with it, move gradually so the people who are not accustomed to the new content come along on the journey, because a community fed ice cream for years will notice the day you serve broccoli.

Full Episode Transcript

Ben Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Van. Van, welcome to the show.

Van Raynor00:05 — Hi, thanks for having me.

Ben Ard00:06 — Yeah. Van, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. You've got a great analogy. You've got some really cool experience. We're going to dive into some really cool stuff. But before we get there, Van, if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about yourself so the audience gets to know you before we kick it off.

Van Raynor00:21 — Yeah, sure. So my name is Van Raynor. I'm the director of social and influencer at Americares. I've been there for about three years now, and we're a global health and disaster relief organization. A lot of my background has been in nonprofit marketing, doing a lot of PSA work. I did do a short stint in finance for a bit, but a lot of my work has been in either the nonprofit or arts marketing spaces, which has been really fun over my career.

I'm currently based in Manhattan. I love it here with my dog Navy. She's sleeping under my desk right now as we speak. So yeah, that's a little bit about me.

Ben Ard00:53 — That's awesome. I love it. Well, what we're going to talk about is the journey from inheriting a community to actually executing campaigns and really thriving in this circumstance. I think it's a useful circumstance in conversation, because a lot of marketers find themselves jumping into a circumstance where they are inheriting a community and they have to understand it and thrive in it. And I think this is going to be fascinating. So let's say you step into a new role, inherit a community that you didn't build. Where do you start? What do you do in that process? How do you actually embrace that scenario? And where do you start to actually make an impact and get things figured out?

Van Raynor01:33 — Yeah. I mean, for many social media professionals, when you get in your job, you're usually inheriting a social community. Nowadays most brands and companies all have some sort of online presence, something that's already been established. Unless you're starting at a brand new startup, or you've been brought in to build out a particular platform that they've never been on, you're usually inheriting something.

And the first thing that you really want to do is you want to take stock of your platforms and take a look at those stats. What's that average reach? What kind of campaigns has your predecessor run? What is your growth rate? What is your attrition rate? But more than that, how has your page been utilized over the years? Is it a broadcast channel? Is it a customer support channel? Is it a sales channel? Really take a snapshot of what your pages are doing, so you've got that base of knowledge when you start looking at your goals and looking at where you want to go next, or why you've been brought into the role to achieve. So really take that snapshot.

Ben Ard02:30 — I love that. I think it's cool, because a lot of times people are like, all right, let's start posting. But I think it's really good to get your bearings and say, awesome, where are we at? What has been done? What does this look like? Okay, now that we have that, where do we go from there? What's the next step? How do we know what the audience cares about? What does it look like from that point forward?

Van Raynor02:50 — Yeah, well the next step is definitely looking at your goals, or creating your goals, if you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can map out what you're looking at. But a lot of times you're being handed certain KPIs to reach. So now that you've done all that research, you've looked into your pages to see what is really happening and how people are interacting, you can look at your goals and say, yes, that's totally feasible, I can definitely reach those with how the community is interacting. Or you're like, no, we need to adjust our goals and our outcomes, there's no way this is going to happen, at least in this year or this quarter, however long it's going to be. Because your community at present may not be built to get your intended outcome yet, because they may be on a completely different diet of content, so to speak. So you have to really look at what is going to move those needles and meet those KPIs.

And so to your point about figuring out what a community actually cares about, what you really need to lean in and listen to, again, look at your data from your analytics and find the patterns, specifically the patterns in the engagement of your content. Really know your audience and look at what they are commenting on, look at what they react to. So for example, I used to work on a PSA campaign. It was all about keeping the US clean and litter free of trash, and recycling. That was the big campaign point, recycle everything.

And so when I looked at the comments and the content resonating, I found two main audiences. And they're very interesting. One was very patriotic, they cared very deeply about their country, and they were very attuned to that. The other were recycle heads. They loved green content, upcycled content, anything that was recycled or supported natural ecosystems. And they would go as far as to call out particular things and say, hey, that thing in the photo that you posted is actually plastic number one, not plastic number four, and you can't recycle that. They were very in the weeds and in the details of what you were posting, so we had to be very specific.

But once I found those were my two main audiences, I wanted to weave those two strengths of my channel together. So whenever I was looking to post, I would always try to find upcycled Americana, because that was just what they loved. So an American flag made out of water bottles, old US road signs made into a sculpture, things that would entice both audiences.

And sometimes it's not as niche as that. Sometimes you won't have a community that is that particular. So for example, when I post about Americares, any post with our staff, photos of them on site during a response or one of our project locations, we always see a bump in likes and comments, because our following loves to see our people in action. Which makes perfect sense, as they most likely followed our page because they wanted to see something done. They want to see communities being supported and getting help. So sometimes it's not as niche as being super patriotic and recycling. You can see those little bumps and those little patterns within your own content, and that's really where you can start to see things.

Ben Ard05:51 — I love it. And props to you for not doing comment bait. I could see a lot of people going in and looking at the plastic and purposely claiming it wrong just to get all the comments saying, wait a minute, that's the wrong kind of plastic. So I love that. I think that's super cool.

So with all of this stuff, you talked about sometimes you have to go into a business or an organization, and sometimes the KPIs and the goals aren't where they should be, where you need to level set, reset expectations, things like that. And with that, your community might need to change. Your community pages, your focus, what you're posting about, your commentary. How do you do that? Again, you inherited this community and you need to steer it maybe in a little bit of a different direction, because that's where the company wants you to go. How do you do that in an organic and genuinely helpful way to the community, without just burning every single possible bridge along the way? What does that look like?

Van Raynor06:51 — Totally. Yeah. Occasionally you'll have a situation where the organization's focus has shifted. Usually it's not completely like a different industry. You're not going to go from selling race cars to household plants. It's not going to be that big of a switch. But your internal focus could have changed a lot, such as taking your social pages from a general company updates page to a full paid marketing engine that's focused on sales, for example.

So when this happens, you really need to look at your content mix. What are you currently posting, or what have you been posting for a while, and what does the new content that will help achieve your new KPIs look like in comparison?

So for example, imagine your whole diet is ice cream every day. Maybe different flavors occasionally, but it's ice cream. For years perhaps. Then one day you get broccoli. Interesting. Is it good? Is it bad? Some people might love it. Some people will say, where's my ice cream?

Your community is accustomed to a certain diet of content. So if you change it, you need to be able to do it gradually, to bring those who are not as accustomed to it on the journey with you to the new content. Slowly shift your content mix.

And this gets into a concept I was taught called vegetables and desserts. So you need to feed your community its vegetables. Think of these as the things you have to get across. So your donate now message, your sales message, your major updates, et cetera. The things that you have to hit for your certain KPIs. Then the opposite of that is the desserts. These are the vibe posts. These are the brand building posts, the fun, lighthearted posts. These can be the fun advertising campaign posts that have the huge celebrity, or the meme you jumped into. It's all those types of fun ways of connecting with your audience that isn't a direct buy now, donate now type of message.

Ben Ard08:35 — So this is the desserts and the vegetables. How do you find balance? Taking that analogy a step further, obviously a real diet has to have a little bit of both to feel happy about it, clearly more on the vegetable side. But how do you find the appropriate balance for your community, not only in the transition period, but long term? How do you know you've found the right mix when you're managing those kinds of posts?

Van Raynor09:03 — When you're balancing the mix of organic posts, you really need to look at the volume and the metrics of those need to share posts. So for example, the vegetable posts are the donate now posts. For Americares, we need donations so that we can continue our work, so we have to include that in our mix of content.

What the organic social team does on our side, because we have organic and we have paid, is we do these in campaign sprints. So several posts over a few weeks of time in conjunction with a larger paid push. We share them out during our heat moments or when it's topical, but we aren't going out every day on the organic side because we will see diminishing returns on our post metrics and click-throughs.

So you need to look at what that volume of posts really is. And it could be different for different channels. It could be eight posts over a four week period, totally fine, you're not seeing a real dip in your engagement rates. But maybe on some pages you might see it after as few as four posts. You just have to gauge how much appetite your community has for those particular posts.

Ben Ard10:06 — I love it. Okay, so I'd like to end the episodes, and we're getting close to being out of time, I'd like to end episodes very tactical. So let's imagine there is a marketer listening to this podcast, and they have just inherited a new community, and they are just absolutely overwhelmed by all of the things they have to do, and all of the things they can do, and all the places they could take this community. What's your advice for where they should start? What they can do this month to actually prioritize what matters the most?

Van Raynor10:39 — Yeah, well, first take a deep breath. Social can get very overwhelming, but take it step by step. You're going to be getting a bunch of requests from all levels of people, all different departments, and it can be quite daunting when you first get there. But just take a breath.

And after that, take a look back. Look at the data, look at the content, look at the campaigns. Get a feel for what has worked well and what hasn't. See how people are interacting on your page and content, and really what is moving the needle.

After that, now you know how your community behaves a bit, look at the goals. Look at what you're trying to achieve. Do the actions your community naturally takes ladder up to your KPIs? Or do you need to create a change in behavior? Or do you need to attract a new group of people that reflect the organization's current direction?

And then lastly, make a plan to get there. Figure out what are your dessert posts, what are your vegetable posts. Understand that this will not happen overnight. It is definitely a journey that you have to go on, where you can see the metrics in a couple weeks or months time. But stick to a plan. Figure out, this is where I've been, this is where I need to go. Find that plan, and stick to it, and test and learn. Social is a great place to test and learn.

Ben Ard11:54 — I love it. Very cool. Thank you for the advice. Very procedural. I love the checklist here to say here's what you do first to move forward with it. Van, this has been an awesome episode. I really do appreciate the time and insights. Thank you, thank you, thank you. For anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best place for them to find you?

Van Raynor12:14 — Yeah, you can find me at vanraynor.com, and I've got my contact details right there, so feel free to reach out.

Ben Ard12:20 — Love it. We will link to Van's website in the show notes for everyone listening. So scroll down, click on the link, connect with Van there. Van, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really do appreciate it.

Van Raynor12:32 — Thank you.

About the guest

Van Raynor

Van Raynor

Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares

Van Raynor is the Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares, the global health and disaster relief organization, where he has worked for about three years. Most of his career has been spent in nonprofit and arts marketing, including a long stretch of PSA work on a campaign about keeping the United States clean and litter free, plus a short stint in finance. That PSA work is where he learned to read a community closely enough to find its real audiences, in that case a patriotic group and a group of recycling enthusiasts who would correct him in the comments when a photo showed plastic number one instead of plastic number four. He is based in Manhattan, where he works with his dog Navy asleep under the desk. He believes every social community is on a diet of content, and that changing that diet takes a gradual shift, a real plan, and a willingness to test and learn. He uses he/him pronouns.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Take stock of the platforms before you post anything. Van's snapshot covers average reach, the campaigns your predecessor ran, the growth rate, and the attrition rate, and then the question he treats as most important: how the page has actually been used over the years. Determine whether it has functioned as a broadcast channel, a customer support channel, or a sales channel, because that history shapes what the audience expects and what they will tolerate next. The goal is to walk into your goal-setting conversation with a real base of knowledge about what the page is, rather than an assumption about what it should be.

Say so, and adjust. Van's sequence is to finish the research on the pages first, then hold the goals up against what you found and make an honest call: either the KPIs are totally feasible given how the community interacts, or they are not going to happen this quarter or this year and the goals and outcomes need adjusting. His reasoning is that the community at present may simply not be built to deliver the intended outcome yet, because it may be on a completely different diet of content than the one that would move those numbers. Making that call early is more useful than chasing a target the audience was never assembled to hit.

It is a concept Van was taught for balancing the posts you have to run against the posts that build the brand. Vegetables are the must-hit posts: the donate now message, the sales message, the major updates, the content carrying your KPIs. Desserts are the vibe posts, the fun and light-hearted brand building, including the advertising campaign post with the huge celebrity or the meme you jumped into, anything that is not a direct buy now or donate now ask. You need both, and the balance comes from watching the volume and metrics of the must-share posts, which is why the Americares organic team runs campaign sprints instead of posting every day.

Do it gradually. Van's analogy is that your whole diet has been ice cream for years, maybe different flavors, and then one day you get broccoli: some people love it, and some ask where the ice cream went. A community is accustomed to a certain diet of content, so if you are going to change it, shift the mix slowly enough to bring the people who are not accustomed to the new content along on the journey. This matters most when the organization's internal focus has moved, for example from a general company updates page to a paid marketing engine focused on sales, and it starts with comparing what you have been posting for a while against the new content that would actually hit the new KPIs.

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