Welcome to another edition of PROse, where we explore the science behind building a brand.

In today’s email, we discuss:

• What is outbound commenting

• How does it work for brand accounts

• The edge cases where it makes sense to do

Yo! I’m Darien from Antidote 👋🏾. Every week I share what I learn about the science of building a brand. If someone forwarded this email to you or you’re reading this online, welcome to the fold! What you're about to read is an unconventional view on B2B marketing.

If you enjoy it, join 350+ other B2B marketers on the journey to build a standout brand.

Outbound commenting is when you leave replies on content you aren’t explicitly tagged in. Think of it like jumping into someone else’s conversation.

The opposite is being tagged in a conversation. This is like when a friend calls or texts you.

If you’ve had the (unfortunate) experience of being on “Audience Growth” Twitter, you’ll see one piece of advice repeated a ton:

“To grow your account, thoughtfully reply to large creators in your space”

It sounds like the right idea. You reply to someone else’s content, and if it’s good enough, people will check out your profile and follow you. Only problem is, that doesn’t really work for brand accounts.

Outbound commenting is a strategy I’ve run for clients/past employers since I started working in social. But I only recently started tracking performance to see how comments do compared to original/top-level content.

In my latest monthly data pull (via Sprout Social), we found a consistent pattern across clients. Comments accounted for:

• 4% of engagements (a like, share or reply to content)

• About 16% of impressions

• 60% of all published content

It was the majority of our published content, but had a minor impact on key performance metrics.

I’m going to dive into why I think this is happening. But first, I want to address the impact on follower growth.

It wouldn’t be wrong to think a thoughtful reply on viral content would lead to new followers. Every once in a while, that is the case. But majority of the time, comments had no effect on follower growth.

Now the calculation behind this isn’t perfect math - but neither is figuring out what content drives followers. Since Twitter and LinkedIn have pretty poor performance analytics, the best you can do is look for correlations between spikes in followers and content performance.

Why don’t outbound comments work?

This is the somewhat mind-bending part - they do, for personal accounts. The gurus weren’t lying about that. I’ve grown my personal account with replies to other people’s content.

Brand accounts don’t exactly work the same as personal accounts, though. Maybe 60% of the strategy is the same, but that 40% is full of dynamic nuances. This is one of those nuances.

Company brands are faceless and generally carry no emotional value for consumers. Hence the rise in personal brands/creators.

People don’t log in to their social media accounts to interact with brands—especially not B2B brands. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably already know that.

So when a brand you don’t know, aren’t a customer of, or didn’t approach replies to your content, it’s like seeing a spam reply. Even when it’s “good” or relevant content.

What are the edge cases?

A key reason jumping into random conversations doesn’t work for brands is that they’re faceless and unknown. However, it can work when you have brand recognition on a global scale or within a niche community.

One of my favorite moments working at Gorgias was when the “gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous girls…” trend was popping off on TikTok. But we were not on TikTok at the time. So when the trend made its way to Twitter, we jumped on it.

It worked because a) it was witty - Gorgias is pronounced like “gorgeous”, but people often got it wrong; b) Gorgias is well-known in the Shopify/ecommerce niche. So people already have some emotional connection to the brand (mostly through meeting the team - this is a separate but important point about building brand equity).

One could argue this comment isn’t necessarily an outbound comment since Keith tells everyone he’s eating Chipotle and, therefore, “inviting” them into the conversation. But since he didn’t tag them explicitly, it’s fair game in my opinion.

Large brands have an advantage over small brands, in that most people would be surprised and welcoming of a comment from a global corporation. It’s effectively the same as talking with a celebrity.

One final edge case that I haven’t tried out but think could work: verified brands. Verification badges convey credibility and notoriety. People are more likely to investigate when they get a comment from a verified account (personal or brand).

Obviously this is much different now that the legacy platforms allow anyone to become verified. But in some cases, like Twitter Gold, it could still work to a brand’s advantage.

Should you stop sending outbound comments?

I wouldn’t go to zero, but it wouldn’t be a huge focus of mine.

Be smart about it. I’ve seen teams take anywhere from 30 mins to 1hr per day sending outbound comments. That’s a lot of time that could be put into higher leverage activities - particularly, creating more original content.

Look for the edge cases like above, where you can leverage your brand’s recognition to raise the odds of getting engagement:

• Customers

• Partner companies and team members

• People who have engaged with previous content

That's a wrap, folks! But before you go...

If you have any data pointing to the contrary on this topic, I’d love to chat! And as always, open to hearing your general feedback!

See you next week,