 This is Social Confidential, where Adweek's social media editors take a look behind the logo to find out who's tweeting and sharing from major brands. Today, I'm here with the minds behind the long boy gang, Slim Jim's mind-bogglingly engaged fan army. With me to discuss the brand's social media strategy are Evan Weisbrot, president of agency 180 New York, and Amy Morgan, brand communications manager at Conagra Brands. Back in 2018, the Slim Jim Instagram account had fewer than 10,000 followers. Could you tell me the story of how you found the pre-existing online community and translated that into over a million followers on Instagram and a rising number on Twitter? Slim Jim has a long-standing history of being bold, of being in your face, and we found people that were very eager to make fun of Slim Jim and more parroting the brand as it currently existed, and we thought those are the kind of people we want to recruit into our team. The minute that we saw someone reference a long boy as a product named for Slim Jim or a surrogate for a Slim Jim, we were like, that's what we are going to become. We are going to double down on long boy. So instead of the narrative being dictated by the brand, the narrative was now shared with this audience, and that's what created that groundswell of not only engagement but desire to be a part of something that was bigger than the brand itself. It was theirs. It requires a good deal of mutual trust, I think, to have a relationship like this. Can you tell me a little bit about that dynamic and where Conagra stands? What has really helped is just laying the groundwork with obviously the right people. The process is in place. We've got the guardrails in place, all the guidelines, you know, so that we really can say, all right, we trust that there's the judgment here to do what is expected from this community because it has to come from the community. You primarily focused on Instagram initially. This year, it really started amping up Twitter. How have you been activating and accelerating this new audience? The interesting place for Slim Jim to play on Twitter was finding a pocket of culture that I think was underserved by brands. Our interest is meet memes and community, and you look at the meme side and the community side, no one's got it better than Dogecoin. And we felt like if Slim Jim just showed up the right way, kind of started throwing the memes out there, doing all the super engagement stuff that we do, some amazing stuff could happen. We definitely attribute a lot of the Twitter success to the way that community has embraced us, but it works both ways. We are really trying to show love to a community that loves us back. And I don't know if any other better way than to kind of just do only good every day and to act as they do and to behave as they do. During this year's March Addness competition, Slim Jim managed to beat Oreo despite having only half the number of followers at the time. Can you explain how you pulled that off? We're audience marketers, right? We are community marketers and we're community builders. And so there's a difference between a community powered brand versus a top down kind of brand. And that really plays out in social media. I think that at the end of the day, it was just a combination of a lot of the fun that we've been having and a lot of the support that we've shown that they were very happy to receive. If you could give one piece of advice to social media managers, what would it be? I think there's a lot to be said for being prepared. When you have that foundation laid, I think it gives you the permission to feel comfortable with taking some risks, being able to act as quickly as you can because you can focus on the activation, build a team that you totally trust and you love working with. My piece of advice would lean into empathy above all else. Be way more human whenever you can. Know your brand to the point where it becomes a reflex, but know your audience even better so that you can be agile and adaptable. Amy, Evan, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having us. I'm Jessica Ferris. See you next time on Adweek's Social Confidential.