Stand Your Ground, Cause Arguments

Comments are needed, comments are important! For SMM professionals, comments are one of the easiest ways to interact with the audience of social networks.

1. Be overconfident and stubborn.

Nothing annoys people more than when someone continues to insist on their own. If you want a hot feed, stick to your point of view. Provide convincing facts and arguments with which you can both agree and disprove. In general, troll yourself and feed the trolls.

2. Create compelling and smart content.

Think about what kind of posts you post on social media. Stick to a certain structure, format, suggest new ideas, express your thoughts. Such content makes readers think, analyze, and, ultimately, agree with your point of view or not.

3. Bring in friends who are “in the know.”

If you are publishing a post about a new product (and indeed about anything) and you know friends or relatives who have their own point of view on the problem, ask them to leave the first comment. This will encourage those who might join the discussion but want to start first. An emotional, passionate first comment is a great start to a long, heated debate.

4. Ask interesting questions.

A good editor picks the most catchy points in the article and places them at the beginning of the text to attract readers. So it is with the comments. Raise painful questions in the comments to the post to solicit feedback from users. Avoid common questions like: “Readers, what do you think?” Draw out controversial, sensitive points. If you do everything right, the comment feed will “boil”.

5. Moderate.

If the first comment is off-topic, delete it. For a commentator who has something to say and wants to be heard, advertising-like or fake comments are a signal that there is no real conversation here, the article is over, and you can leave. Want to have more comments? Feel free to delete unnecessary items.

Generally speaking, audience engagement begins much earlier than the user reads this or that material in your community, and even before you create a rubricator. You need to know in advance what is interesting to your audience, and be able to achieve the commercial goals of the project, keeping in this channel. This requires research, communication policy, strategy, rubricator, content plan, etc. But you can also give practical advice that is relevant at the stages of direct creation and layout of content, as well as the further organization of discussions. They are quite simple and are actually known to everyone.

First, get your content readable. You don’t just create them, right? You need to ensure that your publications get into the news feed of community members. Choose a release time when you do not have to compete with 50 more sources that your target audience reads, or achieve quality superiority. To do this, pay attention to the brightness and meaningfulness of the title picture, write attractive titles. In the first sentences, present the central issue of the publication so that the user who skims through the feed immediately understands what the article is, identifies the news feed and has the motivation to “read on”.

Happened? Are you being read? Now become a constant source of information for your audience. For this, the stability of the quality of the content, the completeness of coverage of the topic you have chosen, the authority of the opinions expressed, the exclusivity of the materials are important. The latter is achieved both due to the freshness of news feeds, and due to the author’s presentation, the expression of unpopular points of view, coverage of the problem from new sides. A provocative question or statement will not be superfluous. Yes, the author’s presentation is important here, and it really makes sense to insist on your own.

Is this provided? Now direct engagement tools will become a key factor. Contact the most active participants personally, ask them questions, support all the dialogues ever started, establish cross-communication, sending questions from one user to another. When the members of your community begin to communicate on their own, without the need for your participation, then there will be so many comments that you will be too lazy to count.

Just do not think that this is achievable earlier than in six months. Serious social bonds don’t build quickly. So my recommendations can be considered applicable for long-term strategies. In the short-term, everything that is usually recommended to increase the “virality” of the content will work more likely, i.e. something like “surprise, amaze, provoke emotions.”