How Slim Jim's Long Boi Gang Surged to 1.2 Million Members

They call themselves the Long Boi Gang. This self-described internet cult is well over 1 million strong and spends its days rallying around dank memes, inside jokes, the foibles of dating—and, of course, meat sticks. Meet the Slim Jim fan army, which has seen explosive growth on social media since early 2019 in large part thanks to the work of agency 180 New York. The agency tapped into a goldmine of preexisting devotees, a strategy that catapulted the brand from “a well-known convenience store stable with a modest following” to a massive, highly engaged brand community with a distinctive and engaging voice. The Long Boi Gang rises Neither the brand nor the agency dreamed up the “Long Boi” moniker. It all started with the fans coming together over memes and the shared experience of enjoying the ubiquitous meat sticks. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sl1M Jim (@slimjim) Back in 2018, the Slim Jim Instagram account had fewer than 10,000 followers. The agency's research found a preexisting online community that already loved talking about the brand. “There was a large pocket of the internet that was fairly depressed, not seen, not heard, starving for connection, wanting to just have permission to laugh a little bit,” said Evan Weissbrot, president of 180 New York and founder of creative agency Bios, which merged with 180 earlier this month. “And the equity of the brand and the history of the brand, it was bold, it was fun, it was in your face—there was parody.” Notably, there was the parody account @SlimJimsDoingThings, which had 15,000 followers, run by Andy Hines, who is credited with coining the Long Boi name. Seeing the success of the account, the agency opted to tap into Hines’ success—and his creative talents: He was hired as a creative content strategist and worked with Weissbrot and team to apply his memetic prowess to the official account. With Hines’ help, the agency took this meme-centric model and fueled it with a supercharged engagement strategy that included the team commenting and replying more than 1,000 times a day across the Slim Jim account’s posts, DMs and tagged images. In May 2020, Hines died of undisclosed causes. Weissbrot said his passing was “gutting for the team.” But his talent for building community lives on, larger than ever and still growing: Since early 2019, the brand’s Instagram follower count has erupted to 1.2 million. And the account doesn’t simply boast powerful numbers in terms of followers—the average engagement rate for each of Slim Jim’s Instagram posts is between 15% and 20%, towering over the median 1.6% rate for brands on the platform, according to Sprout Social. Weissbrot said the account is tagged between 100 and 200 times a day in images of people showing off their Slim Jims and asking “Am I in the gang? Is this gang?”—and of course, the answer is always yes. “It speaks to the embedded love for the brand that's been there for a really long time, and the way it's been modernized for today's culture,” Weissbrot said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sl1M Jim (@slimjim) View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sl1M Jim (@slimjim) The Instagram gang also plays a key role in steering community development beyond social media. That means fulfilling requests for branded apparel (including shirts designed to hold Slim Jims), accessories and limited edition flavors, which often sell out within a day. “We’re basically creating our own demand and then fulfilling it,” Weissbrot said. When one fan said he’d get a Slim Jim tattoo, and a tattoo artist responded offering to do it, the brand flew the fan out to the artist. One time, the gang requested a 20-foot Long Boi—and the brand delivered. Once the team made it, they carried it through the streets of New York and took requests on what locations should be graced with a 20-foot piece of meat. Using 50,000 responses as their guide, they livestreamed their journey across the city—even through the subway—to 10 different spots. https://twitter.com/SubwayCreatures/status/1205504553539555328?s=20 The bigger picture From a broader perspective, 180 New York leveraged Slim Jim as an emblematic test case for tapping into culture across all of the brands within parent company Conagra Brands. Of course, that doesn’t mean all memes all the time for brands like Duncan Hines, Reddi-wip and Angie's. But it does mean diving into consumer communities in a way that fits each brand, like tapping into a network of flexitarian lifestyle influencers to fuel the Gardein plant-based protein brand. “It’s very much audience-centric—spotting opportunities and culture, turning them into kind of agile, proactive briefs, and then deploying them in real time, assessing and then scaling what's working,” Weissbrot said. It also takes trust on the part of the brand, which in Slim Jim’s case meant allowing an avalanche of daily content and communication to flow organically on the account. “It’s about embedding the right people to be able to very quickly react to things,” said Conagra Brands' brand communications manager Amy Morgan. Social Confidential: How Steak-umm Blesses Twitter With Wisdom and Humor

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Meat and Memes: How Slim Jim’s Long Boi Gang Surged to 1.2 Million Members

The ubiquitous snack brand grew its modest following by tapping into an already passionate community

The Long Boi Gang rises

Jess Zafarris

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Jess Zafarris