Comments are one of the most immediately understandable and visceral forms of engagement.
First, comments leave nothing up to interpretation - it is a -direct- message from a fan (or hater) saying precisely what they think on the matter of your art, compared to something like a post ‘like’.
Secondly, out of all of the people your ad reaches, the severe minority will be ones that comment. So, these people are particularly passionate!
With this in mind, preparing to capitalize on comments is very important if we want to get the most bang for our buck on our advertising, and ensure that we are rewarding our most interested audience and pulling them deeper into the education phase.
The simplest way to capitalize?
Respond!
This isn’t a non-answer. I want to challenge you to respond in -some- way to every comment you get on any post or ad you make. Being around to represent yourself, add context, address concerns, or provide value brings this valuable segment of engagement further into trusting you and understanding what you’re about. Consider every comment an opportunity to deepen the education layer.
There are a few ways to steer comment interactions that can be helpful to you. It’s up to you to figure out which of these approaches will be most valuable at a given moment.
If you’re running your first fan finder, this will be your default approach for a long while. It sounds innocuous, but being around to show that you are a real person that cares about what they think about your music is an easy way to initiate the Education phase and stay top of mind for these people.
If you are just starting to build your fanbase and don’t have much going on quite yet in terms of other assets you can show off, you might just want to initiate a conversation with these fans. These conversations can offer qualitative information that help you to understand the average “avatar” of your fans. I would recommend keeping a file of qualitative traits you seem to commonly find amongst your fans.
We will be getting into this later in the training, but having something at the ready for this fan to partake in that might be fun for them is a great thing to offer to positive comments. These assets can be permission offers that give something in return for an email sign up, or a number of lower-impact education automations that we will talk about building later on in the training.
Okay, this may seem intensely obvious to you - but walking by comments or not wanting to deal with them is money left on the table. Trust me.
