Ben & Jerry's Netherlands and the tweet about #lovewhoyoulove

[arzina221]

“There will always be people against us”
Recently, while running, Stephan heard on the radio that Exodus, a Christian organization in America, was against gay marriage. One of the leaders apologized for this: they should never have said that. Knowing how Ben & Jerry's feel about this as individuals and as a company, Stephan posted a picture of the two cows and the text "love who you love" that evening. Followers did disappear, but "a good conversation about certain social issues is much more valuable than the number of fans. I accept that consequence. If you stand up for something, you will always have people who are against it."

Ben & Jerry's Netherlands and the tweet about #lovewhoyoulove

You guys are more into content than straight up promotion. Is that right?
“We see Twitter as a separate communication channel and we don’t really do any promotions. Except when we had 10,000 followers, we also got 10,000 retweets for free ice cream. We thought that was so bizarre, our phones were red hot! A nice sign that we are rewarded by our fans in any case.”

“In turn, we want to reward everyone who says something to us, whether it’s negative or not, with attention. We really appreciate that you like us, or that you’re a fan of us, or that you have an opinion about us at all – and that can be negative, that’s part of it. We always want to show that we think it’s cool that you’re interested in us as a hungary phone data brand that also has people behind it. That’s why we’re going to have a conversation with you.”

Ben & Jerry's was on Hyves in the Netherlands for a very short time, before they switched to Facebook. When Stephan was hired, he was told that 'we're putting Twitter on hold for a while , because it takes up too much time'. He explains that they fully realised that you have to be reachable there day and night. Moreover, Stephan noticed a different character between the Facebook fans and the Twitter followers. That's why they only really started with Twitter in January 2013. In a few months, Twitter has perhaps become your most important channel for webcare. With hardly any advertising budget, there are now 33,000 followers, compared to 1,000 in January 2013.

Why is Twitter doing so well?
“Let me tell you a story. The first thing I did here was to create some order and then I discovered that several channels had been claimed with similar names. One fan account stood out: it was well maintained and had a lot of followers. Then I asked around and sent a direct message from my private account . Joli, as she is called, said: 'oh no, now I've been caught!'. That same evening we called each other and then I invited her to the office, because I thought it was really cool. That's why we immediately hired her as a Ben & Jerry's team member for webcare and since then we've been going really well.