What Is Outbound Community Management?
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“Trojan condoms be wildin in peoples comment section on tiktok” “no cuz why do I see ucla housing in every comment section on tiktok 😭” “Duolingo be in every tiktok comment section” If there’s a video going viral on TikTok, it’s likely you’ll find a brand in the comment section. Over the past few years, we’ve seen an uptick in what is being called “outbound community management”—brands actively commenting on viral videos where their audience might be. What started as a more ad hoc initiative, has turned into a full blown strategy at some brands. Companies like Oatly and C4 Energy have hired employees who spend a good portion of their time developing an outbound commenting strategy and looking for videos to engage with.
For example, Chandler Oriente is a Community Specialist at C4 Energy and is responsible for both owned community management (responding to DMs) and outbound community management (“showing up naturally where our audience already is and add to their experience with fun comments”). His comments on viral videos have accumulated over 1M comment likes in under six months. (That is A LOT!) The brand treats comments as top-of-funnel marketing to bring new audience into their channels. At Oatly, they are taking a similar approach. In a LinkedIn post, Paula Perez, Social Engagement & Community Growth Specialist at Oatly, said “we really stepped up our outbound comment game this year, especially by showing up in places where we weren't tagged but it ~just made sense~ for us to contribute.” For today’s interview, I am digging deeper into outbound community management with Paula. We talk about choosing what videos to comment on, how to avoid “silence, brand” vibes, and how they measure success.
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Rachel Karten: First can you tell me about your current role and any previous social (or not!) roles you've had? Paula Perez: I just started a new role at Oatly as the Social Engagement & Community Growth Specialist, which is part of the community team. I’ll be continuing the work I did as a Community Manager to elevate proactive engagement and social listening, while also collaborating with our creative, communications, and social teams to bring a community angle to everything we do. My goals in this new role are to ensure Oatly is never left out of relevant conversations on social, reach more people who align with us and our mission, and position our community team as an insights hub for other teams. Before joining Oatly, I held roles in social media, partnerships, and events for brands and nonprofits working to better our food system. I especially loved my time on the marketing team at Dig, where I helped launch several new locations and learned all about experiential marketing. I also like to think my time running stan accounts and a foodie Instagram in middle and high school counts as relevant career experience. RK: I'd really love to focus this interview on your outbound commenting strategy! Can you tell me a bit more about it? PP: Outbound commenting for us is all about creating unexpected, highly intentional interactions in the comments section. We see it as a true community-building endeavor, so it’s less about getting as many likes as possible and more about saying something that only makes sense coming from us. In the best-case scenario, our comment finds the people we’re trying to reach and also becomes a top comment, like this one we left on a funny skit about being lactose intolerant.
This strategy informally started when we launched our TikTok profile, and our crew of three TikTok-specific community managers was brainstorming ways to let our community know we were finally on the platform. Of course, we’d seen Duolingo and UCLA Housing in tons of comments sections, so we knew it was a popular strategy for other brands. We’d previously shied away from this on other platforms because it felt too invasive but decided to try a more proactive commenting approach on TikTok. And it took off from there! RK: And can you briefly summarize how this strategy fits into your larger social strategy? PP: To summarize our social media strategy, it’s about being unpredictable and bending the rules wherever we can. It’s also about having the range to post our weird nonsense posts we’re often known for, while also introducing people to complex conversations about climate footprint labeling or beta-glucans. And this very much mirrors our engagement strategy, where we focus on reaching people in unconventional places. We’ve always known the comments section can be just as entertaining as the original post. Our community team starts monitoring and engaging with the comments as soon as our social team posts a piece of content, so we always try to make our socials feel like a two-way exchange. Our outbound strategy just extends that feeling to comments sections outside of our own channels, where we can significantly increase visibility and find specific groups we want to reach. Outbound commenting also pushes us to adapt the Oatly voice in a new way. We can’t use our classic paragraph captions in a TikTok comment, for example, so we’ve had to think about how to write concisely without losing that iconic Oatly style. RK: How do you decide what makes sense for Oatly to engage with and comment on? PP: The barista community shows us so much love on and offline, which happens to be a huge niche on TikTok and IG. We mainly focus on those groups that have supported us for a long time: coffee, foodies, dairy-free, and vegans, etc. So far, that’s given us plenty of material to work with. If we do branch out, we usually look for opportunities to insert that irreverent, self-aware voice Oatly is most known for.
RK: Do you have an approval process for these types of outbound comments? How important is it that the person commenting really understands the brand's voice and tone? PP: Our community team has always prioritized being highly responsive on all channels, which wouldn’t be possible if every response required approval. We’re all very collaborative and often do writing workshops and guideline updates to make sure we’re on the same page about how our social responses should sound on different platforms. Our smaller TikTok community crew already had that existing trust and training by the time we created our outbound comment strategy. All three of us have at least a couple years of experience on the community team, which is a big reason why we’re able to lean into social media speak without losing the unique Oatly tone and POV. Our TikTok crew also spent a lot of time setting loose guidelines for ourselves when we first started out. Our response to a creator who roasted our brand’s theme song took us almost 2 hours to perfect, because we had to consider a whole list of questions we hadn’t thought about before. How do we respond to competitors? Upper or lowercase?
RK: Have you ever commented on something that maybe you shouldn't have? Or has there ever been feedback from an audience like "silence, brand"? PP: I would always rather pass on an opportunity if it doesn’t feel totally right than to leave a risky comment and regret it later. We definitely like to be cheeky, but we’re also aware that most people don’t come to social media to see what brands are up to. I’m personally very wary of using shock value as engagement bait, so it’s more about leaving comments that feel really aligned for our brand vs. commenting the most outrageous thing possible. I want the reaction to be more “omg I feel so seen,” and less “wtf how did this get past your legal team.” RK: How do you measure success with an initiative like this? Can you talk me through some of the numbers that point to this working? PP: We’re at around 50K likes on outbound comments in the past year-ish, but we mainly determine success by the tone and number of replies. My favorite reaction is when creators decide to make a video in response to our unexpected comment and it turns into an inside joke with their community. We’ve seen that happen with this person who made a joke about how much the bi community loves oat lattes, and this viral cat who loves oatmilk. RK: Is there a favorite example of yours of a comment really taking off or getting a lot of attention? Why did it work? PP: I’m really proud of a comment I left in response to a recent Instagram post from Queen Latifah, which was a paid partnership with Got Milk. We caught it right after it went live, and I was confident people would pick up on it being blatant propaganda from big dairy. I wanted to make sure we didn’t sound overly snarky or defensive, so my goal was to show people the tide has turned in favor of reducing dairy consumption in an unbothered way. We also never speak poorly about competitor brands or other plant-milks—we’re happy if people find a plant-based option that works for them. So, I went with this open-ended question I hoped would rally the anti-dairy community, and they came through with the most replies we’ve gotten on a comment! The replies also totally aligned with our ethos that dairy-free looks different for everyone, but we can still come together for a common cause.
RK: How much of you or your team's time is spent on outbound commenting currently? Does it require you or your team to be very online? PP: We spend anywhere between three to five hours a week commenting on posts—which looks like scrolling through our feeds, searching for content using specific keywords, and engaging with our circle of creators we love and align with. I do spend a gross amount of time scrolling through my own feeds and analyzing internet trends, which definitely helps me write better social copy. I think people on the internet just like knowing that the person behind a brand’s handle hangs out in the same online spaces as them, and therefore they *just get it*. And even though we rarely participate in trends, we have to be aware of what’s trending to then subvert it and make it our own. RK: What advice would you give a brand that's interested in adopting this kind of community strategy? PP: I have one analogy that helps me make almost all decisions—jumping into the comments section as a brand is like showing up to someone’s house for the first time, sometimes even uninvited. You’re coming into their space, where they have their own rules and preferences already set in place. Their friends might also be there, and they have some inside jokes you aren’t totally in on. You should try to figure out what makes them most comfortable and always give back in some way, not make things all about you. It’s much harder to go wrong when you come from a place of empathy, connection, and adding value.
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