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When you ignore your comments section, you’re leaving your devoted audience out in the cold!

Does that sound dramatic? I promise it isn’t!

Engagement on social media isn’t always easy to come by. If you don’t have a way of organically siphoning people to your page and can’t afford to boost posts, your posts could very well be populated by tumbleweeds. It’s tough, but that’s the social media landscape we’ve got at the moment.

“Likes” and other, more passive forms of engagement are nice, but when someone takes the time out to write a thoughtful comment on one of your posts, it really is poor customer service to some degree to not respond.

However, comments are not something you should just fire off. They’re just as much a part of your content approach as anything else and should be developed carefully with the goal of furthering your brand’s message. “Thanks for your comment” or “Totally agree” are better than not replying at all, but they’re not the kind of comments I would accept from my team, and in my experience clients aren’t wild about them either.

So let’s talk about how you can craft a comment to further the conversation around your brand!

Fundamentally, there are two kinds of comments: negative and positive. Positive comments will tend to be shorter and give you less to build off of when replying. If you keep track of the people who are commenting, you can add personalization to your replies. Say you have a frequent commenter named Kim who will say something to the effect of “Awesome!” on every post. What I would suggest is: “Thanks, Kim! Back at ya. We always love seeing you be the first to comment.” It’s not Shakespeare, but it shows that you’re a brand that recognizes your audience’s time and effort.

For a negative comment, you’ll have more to go off of. Usually, negative commenters will bring up specific points that you can address. If you know your brand back-to-front, you can politely correct them and offer up more information. I would suggest only doing this once—you do not want to get baited into a comment war with an angry troll.

Your comments section is an opportunity to draw people further and further into your brand. “We have a blog about that right here!” “We actually talked about that on our latest podcast.” Never come off as over-eager to promote your content, but don’t let opportunities pass either.

Finally, make sure that the accounts person managing your comments section either is or has access to a subject matter expert. You want to project full confidence in the brand at all times and speak from a position of knowledge and authority.

Everything your brand puts online is a reflection of who they are. Audiences want to communicate with brands who put in the effort to build a relationship. It’s no surprise then that comments are an integral part of your content strategy and a key component of building an authentic digital brand.