Taming The Comment Stream: Strategies For Social Media Engagement

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host and better half, Tracy Hazard, and today we're going to talk about social media, in fact, taming the comment strategies for social media engagement. And my goodness, that says a lot in that title right there, Tracy, doesn't it?

Well, it sets a priority. It sets a priority to the fact that engagement really has to do with commenting. Now, there are engagement types where in various algorithms, likes and follows and shares and stuff count. But for the most part, from every big influencer organization, I've talked to those that are like, advising advertisers on who they should treat as a real influencer. Everyone is telling me that if they don't see comments, and a lot of them, then they are not a true influencer. That's the reality. So if there's not a lot of engagement going on in your comments section, then there's not a lot of opportunity for someone to buy stuff from you. As far as they're concerned, it's passive in terms of that. So, I mean, look, it happens all the time. Think about this. It takes a lot more work for me to comment on something than it does to hit the like button.

Yes.

In fact, sometimes the like button is simply I see you. That's all it is, right? I see you. I heard it, whatever it is, but it's not even like a, like it's just letting you know I'm there.

It's an acknowledgement. To me, it's sort of a vote or an endorsement that, hey, that was a good post. It was worth me taking the time to hit that button in a lot of cases. I'm glad I did. Right. I'm glad I saw it over on YouTube.

There's a thumbs up, thumbs down. That's pretty common on YouTube videos for you to do that. And so I regularly do that. So when somebody, and it just happened the other day, Joanne Chen, I was on her podcast as a guest and I went over there and she sent me the YouTube video link that she didn't actually send me the podcast link. She sent me, the YouTube video link, which said to me, this is a priority of importance for her. And so I went over there and I thumbs up it from every one of my YouTube accounts, which I happen to have five. So I thumbs it up it. So she knew and I jump started the liking process. But I only commented from my account because that meant nothing if I commented from all the other accounts. I mean, the Binge factor has an account. Podcasters United has an account. But I wanted to comment as me because I was her guest, right? So I did that there. That's important to help her jumpstart that video and get that video more circulation. So it's important to every podcaster, every videocaster out there that these comments move through it whenever you can. And lucky for us, YouTube makes it really easy.

YouTube does. And I, I've always, I've noticed that. I have to admit, I'm not as. I guess I'm not as much of a YouTube video viewer that I do it a lot. I mean, I guess I don't spend an awful lot of time just watching YouTube videos and deciding do I like it or dislike it, right?

I'm not a video watcher at all. You know that I'm a reader, right? So I, I do not watch videos at all. But it's, I mean, look, this is a. I was a guest on a show. I owe her to engage with her. And how many of our guests don't? And part of it is that they don't know what to do. So part of my advice here today is about getting the engagement moving with your guest for them because they're very comfortable with direct messages. I guarantee you they're probably gotten tagged in things before and then it shows up in their notifications and then they do something. But if I send an email to my guest that says, hey, go like comment and share on Facebook, on Instagram, they might not. That just might not be where they are. They just don't log into Instagram enough. And it's. You just don't know if it is truly something. They have to go look for you. So because the algorithm, even though they were in there, if you didn't do it right on the other end of tagging them in the post and doing what you're supposed to do on your end when you put them into LinkedIn or you put them into Facebook, right? And you put the post in there, just because your episode went live, if you didn't do a proper job of tagging them, they don't know it's there. And so they'd have to go find you and find it. And a lot of times if you're not connected as friends, you can't even tag each other. So like, it's kind of an issue there as well. So that's one of the really important things that I'd like to do when I start my podcast episodes with my guest is I confirm that I've. We've connected on social media platforms that matter to me. I don't check everywhere because I don't expect all my guests to be everywhere. But I do check YouTube and I. So I checked to make sure they have a YouTube, because you can tag anywhere, anyone on YouTube, you can tag another channel, you can do all of that. So like, that's not an issue. I just want to make sure they have one and I've got the name right and then I will. Or if they have more than one, that I get the one that matters to them the most. Cause I'm only going to tag one.

That can be the trickiest part. A lot of people have multiple profiles or identities on social and that can make it confusing, right?

And so I always confirm that and then I personally confirm LinkedIn because that's what I care about, right? So if it happens on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and that's okay with me, but it's not important to me to check those things. And I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through all their social media channels and confirming everything. I just want to make sure LinkedIn is right and I know which YouTube to use. That's it. That's my priorities. And once I do that, those are where I'm going to spend my time commenting, because that's what's important to me and the growth of my business and the visibility for the show, that's where I get the most future clients coming from. So my majority of listeners are in those two places, or viewers and YouTube, but they're there. So I want to make sure that I get that right. So that's the first thing to start, is to make sure you can actually tag your guests.

Pretty fundamental.

It seems like it is, but we don't do it often enough. We don't check it. And you're. If you have a team, a social media assistant or you're using a scheduling software, a lot of times the tags don't work. So you have to personally go back in and edit it from within LinkedIn to get the tag to work or edit it from in Instagram to tag it to Work. Right. And sometimes tagging in the comments doesn't work. I mean, in the profile doesn't work and we have to use the comments. So that's also something to remember is that sometimes there's social media channels that just won't let you do that. So you've got to do it in the comments field. So that's one of the things that I do. So I know my episode comes out on Wednesdays, came out today, and I'll go and I'll check and make sure that that tag is bright blue. Right. And that it's connected to the guest. And if it's not working, I'll tag them in the comments and if it's still not working, I'll go friend them again if something happened. Right. Like that's usually what that means, is that they didn't happen. So I just check that. It takes one minute to do that. And when I tag them in the comments, if I do do that, I will make a statement. I will say, I really loved what you shared about this piece of advice. Thank you so. And so I do it that way because it should be a meaningful comment. It not just a thank you for being on my show.

Well, also what that's going to do is build some anticipation for people reading that comment that, ooh, I want to hear what he or she had to say about that. So now I'm gonna go click and go watch. Right.

But more importantly, it's also gonna create engagement with the guests because how many people, if you just thank them, they can hit the like button. But if you say thank you for this piece of advice, it was really valuable. You wanna answer back, you wanna say, I'm so glad you got use of that.

Well then at that point, if they're really worth anything on social media, they should share it with all their followers too, and not just comment. I think the more you engage, the more you encourage them.

Exactly. So now you've kind of set that up. They found the post, they've been tagged in it, they've got something to respond to. Why wouldn't they share it at that point if they haven't already? So you're getting that moving additionally, because now you're starting to. If they comment back, instead of just liking, now you're nesting comments. Right. So now you're getting a much richer algorithmic kick from the commenting that's going on. So this is really important to think about. So I'm a big fan of not only guest tagging in the profile above or in the Post above, but guest tagging in the comments as well. If you have many, many guests on your show, I do each one separately in the comments. I don't do like, you know, if you had a panel. I don't do all five names. It's too generic. It's not useful. I want to tag each one individually because now you've got five opportunities for responses and it's very personal and individual. Anyone who does me in a mask, the only thing they're going to get from me is a heart. So they didn't achieve what they wanted to achieve.

The other thing that I often see people doing, and I know we tend to do it too. Certain kinds of social media posts are not like clickable linked posts. Often the place to put a link to whatever media you want people to go to, whether that's your YouTube video or going to your podcast on a certain app, or better yet, the podcast page on your own website. Drive the traffic back to your home base is to put the link to that in a comment, right?

And that's what we do when we share a short, right? If you share a short, that's not the whole entire clip you need to share where to go see that, where to go watch the whole thing, where to go find the whole thing. And so typically what I do is I'll put a comment into the guest and then the next one I might do is say, hey, if you'd like to see the entire interview with and then tag them again. You really don't want to miss going here. And I almost always just straight send my blog, right? Like that's my blog link. Because that's where I want them to go. Because that's also where I know they're going to be able to connect to the guest easiest. So it's the most valuable for both of us. Of course, if I've got them tagged, they're going to go right to their LinkedIn or their Twitter or their Facebook or whatever that is. But this ensures that they're going to get even more bio and detail on that person if they go to the blog. But you can send them to YouTube. You can't do this. Remember, when you send outside of the social media channel, it is not going to help you as much. So it's useful to the readers and to the people at social media followers who are following that post, but it is not necessarily useful to the algorithm. Just keep that in mind. Because they do not want them leaving Facebook.

They don't. Their job to keep them in there, you are better served, it depends, I guess, who you are and what kind of engagement you have on Facebook or kind of groups. And if you're a serious major social media influencer, maybe you do want to keep them on social media. But I would say for the vast majority of us engaging in social promotion, you're better served getting people off of that app and over to your territory, your domain, usually your website.

Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit, Tom, about what meaningful engagement is. You do a lot of engagement on Facebook with your friends and family and stuff like that?

Well, and actually a lot of customers too, I think I can sort of track. I think somewhere around 2016 or 2017, my Facebook lives got sort of merged.

Not your Facebook Live, like live streams, your Facebook life.

Life, my life, my Facebook identity, profile, whatever. It used to be in the very beginning on social media that Facebook was personal stuff for me and LinkedIn was professional stuff. And there were these sort of separation there. And now, you know what, in business, so many customers connect with me on Facebook. I departed from that years, years ago. So yeah, I do a lot of engagement with customers there too. And that can be very interesting because we have customers in all different spectrums of life and business and political views and all sorts of things. We have some podcasters that are really controversial in their podcast, politically to one extreme and the other. So it's very interesting being friends with all those people and it does present some comment challenges.

Let's talk meaningful comments. Right? Meaningful comments are when somebody asks a question, that's a meaningful comment. If they ask you a follow up question, if they say, oh, I did that, thank you so much for the advice and here's an example. Or they thank you for it because they got results. That's like a testimonial, right? They refer someone, they tag someone else to read the post. I love those. Those are like, you don't want to let those meaningful engagements go without a reward because you want to encourage more of that. So I'm not going to say something to somebody who goes, great post. Not I'm going to hit like, but somebody who says, what would you do? In this case, I'm completely going to reward that with an answer. I'm going to tag them back on it, which is what they want because they want their followers to see that they've got engagement going on with them personally. Testimonials. I'm going to share that. Like, I'm going to share their comment. Right? Like, so it's going to be even more important Referrals, the same thing. I'm going to say, thank you so much for referring us, we appreciate and value your business. And then connect up to the person they referred and say, hey, after you read this, reach out to me, DM me. Let me know what I can do for you. So you're setting up all that follow up and doing that. So that's really important to reward the type of meaningful engagement you want in your social media channel in general. And doing that is going to encourage people who want to be seen by you to do it properly. What about negative? You talked about those controversial people. Yeah, there's a lot of negative going on out there. What do you do?

The social channels really reward it because it keeps people engaged and that's what they want. It keeps people using the app. So what do you do? It's very difficult. If you're gonna comment, you have to decide if you're gonna participate in that discussion or not. But I'll tell you, to me, the best practice if you're gonna comment is to try to use empathy to in your comment so that it doesn't just feel like somebody's punching you and you punch back or somebody's punching someone else and you're defending them or you're piling on.

Right. Like there's a very big difference between someone just disagreeing with your perspective and someone being hateful and having a personal attack. Anything that is hateful with a personal attack. This is what I learned from Inc Magazine. You don't engage because it's actually likely spam. If you want to think of it like that. They're doing it because it's fueling what they want the algorithm to treat their channel. So they're benefiting from it. You are not. So if you refuse to engage, they will stop doing it. So if it feels personal and if it feels hateful, and if it's against kind of the way you want to run your channel and you want to run your show, then don't engage.

Well, and if it's actually your post, you have the ability to delete comments most of the time on most platforms.

Yeah. Deleting comments is very dangerous.

Or hiding them.

Right. Deleting comments is very dangerous if you can hide comments because. And they won't notice that you hide them. So some of the channels allow you to do that. Yeah, go ahead and do that if that's what you choose. I mean, you're allowed to curate your own stuff. But keep in mind that deleting them, removing them, reporting them, doing Any of those things can inflame a hateful situation. So you do have to be cautious on that. And so Inc Magazine was advising us as journalists on how to handle this at a level. So look, hate mail happens and at a journalist level hate mail happens. When you're hitting a hot topic, these things happen. And it's one thing to have disagreement and discourse and another to feel personally attacked and it to feel dangerous. And so that is perfectly okay. We are in our rights as non public figures and non government figures, right. To be able to block whoever we choose. Right. It is our platform. There is no obligation for you to have to keep people on that platform.

But definitely, usually if you have a either insulting comment, but just say a mean comment, whatever you want to call it, hateful I guess is the word you used or a very strong opinion that usually you'll find those comments are not backed up by anything. They're just spewing rhetoric of some kind. And I often find to reply saying, hmm, I hear what you hear what you're saying, but here's another perspective. And if you actually can provide a resource, an article, something that actually is a resource that gives another perspective, that can be a decent, engaging kind of a comment too.

And I'm going to say to you, Tom, that's when you have to do a little research first before you engage in that comment.

Yeah.

No, not only do you have to know what you're doing, you have to check out that person's profile and understand what they're doing. Because 90% of the time, 90 and it could even be way, way higher depending on the platform. 90% of the time that is the only driver. They're a brand new profile who just popped up, who's only trying to game the algorithmic system and they want you to engage with them so you're giving them what they want. But it's really a of spam and so you're wasting your time. They are not a client, they will never be a client. They will never lead you to clients. Their audience isn't worthwhile. So unless someone who you know, part of your community and you actually know them and they're disagreeing with you, then I wouldn't bother. It's a slippery slope to wasting your time and energy and distracting your audience because you they could trigger you at some point and then you'll handle it badly and that's what they're trying to do.

It also depends a lot if it's a good comment on a post you made or it's you know, someone else's post. And it's a. I mean, there are many.

We're talking here about comments on our posts, on our own posts of our episodes or our, you know, things that we're sharing about our show. So if we're talking about that. So there are four ways that INC taught us to handle this. You handle it with grace and empathy.

Right. That's, to me, the number one rule. Yeah.

You ignore it. You block them if it's dangerous or if it's spam, because you don't want them in your community. You don't want them in your page, you don't want them in your group. Right. And then the fourth way is you handle it rude and defensively. And obviously that's not always a great idea. It usually backfires on you.

Yeah, that's usually a quick path to spiraling down somewhere. That's not gonna be good.

Right. If somebody disagrees with you, most people are gonna react defensively. They double down. That's a mistake. If you're trying to do business with your community, if you're trying to be a good mentor, if you're trying to be a good coach, you can't act defensively. You have to be open to other ideas. Now you can disagree back. That's okay, right? You can say, I hear you. I've never known anyone to actually be successful with that strategy. I would love to hear more about that. But here's why my advice is the way that it is. Because this works nine times out of ten, whatever that might be. Right. And that's what you're saying, or it's specifically for this kind of person. And I don't think you have that kind of business. If you really do know who they are, there can be a constructive way to disagree that actually shows the right people that you were targeting that advice at that your advice is the one they should be listening to. You can also acknowledge that, hey, I know my advice is not the prevailing opinion, but my advice is backed by X, Y and Z and statistics.

Or experience or whatever.

Or experience or whatever. And I hear you on this, But I still, I'm seeing, you know, this is old advice or this is whatever that is. And I. I hear you on this. Everybody says this. That doesn't mean it's right. We get a lot of those.

There's. There's definitely things you could do to de. Escalate situations. And I. I find it's related to empathy. But usually someone's making a statement and you just reflect that back to them and says, so I hear you're saying that you believe this. Is that right? And then when you say, is that right? Then they're naturally in their head going to say yes in their mind, even if they don't comment back, they're going to say that. And just when they're in agreement with whatever you're saying, boy, does that lower the temperature very quickly.

So I wish I could tell you that you're not going to get hate mail. I wish I could tell you. Or hate comments. Right? I wish I could tell you that that's not gonna happen. It happens a lot, especially to women podcasters more than men podcasters. Happens a lot. And it doesn't matter whether you have a controversial topic or not.

Sadly. True. We've experienced this.

There's a lot of bullying out there. And I have to coach this. We have actually a whole episode we did quite a while ago about it. It's one of the early episodes we did in the feature brand show because it is very common for women to be bullied here. And we want you to understand you're putting yourself out there and your show feels very personal. So these attacks feel very personal. But most often when I've looked into them for clients who've reached out to us and who's like, been really upset and stressed about it, I will say to them, this is not about you. This person is not even attacking you because they listen to your show. They're attacking you because they're trying to game an algorithm. It's spamming. It still doesn't diffuse the hurt.

Essentially, people are not even trying to game the algorithm, but they have some scar, something they've, you know, happened to them in the past and something you said may have triggered them and, you know, didn't even realize how mean they're being, maybe. Right. And there's not much you can do about that. It's all about them. It's really not about you.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard it before. I get it all the time. And usually it's very. I once was at a speech in front of a group of women financial managers who. And this guy who runs a big news network, he was there at the front and he said that he never, ever heard a complaint about the voice from on a male broadcaster, but he would get complaints all the time. You should take her off the air. Her voice is so annoying. Like, that was the comment again and again and again. And he was like, I never gonna listen to this. There's no validity to this. It has nothing to do with anything. It's misogynistic. And he's like, but this is the complaint. I would never hear that about a male broadcaster in this particular situation. So those things can happen and they do feel really personal, but it's not about you, it's about that person on the other end, their pain, their problems. So don't engage. If you have a co host, you can have the opposite sex engage. That sometimes helps. Or the same sex engage, I should say, instead of the opposite sex engaged. So you can do that, that can help there. But another thing that you can do, and this is really, is to. In some platforms, and I think you can do this in YouTube and you can do this in your blog, you can shut comments down. And I usually am a fan of shutting comments down on the blogs because It's. It's almost 99.9% spam.

Just had a conversation with podcaster of ours yesterday about this and they, you know, we're talking about the comments and how to manage that. And I said, you know, years ago, we shut them off because it just the few number of comments that were actually useful and valuable and helpful for the blog were so few compared to all the bots that are trying to submit comments and get backlinks from your blog on your website to their website and then had this conversation with the customers. Well, can't they do it so I can review the comments and have to approve them before I go up? It's like, yeah, you certainly can. But I bet we'll be having a conversation in another two months. As you've been doing this for a while. I can hardly keep up because you're getting 10,000 bot comments. You have to moderate and decline, and you've had like five or six that were any good that you put on there. So we've abandoned comments a long time ago, and I haven't found they really contribute very much to SEO of a website either. I know there was a theory back 10 years ago was that those comments help to add value to your posts. And I think it's, you know, if it's a blog post, it's a little different. Different than if it's like a Reddit thread or something, Right. Where the comments are very, you know, useful.

That's the whole point of it.

Right? The comments are the engagement. Kind of like we were talking about commenting on social media. It's very similar.

Right, right.

But comments on your blog, it's not the same.

No, it's really not. Unless you have a membership group and you're using it in that way. That's a completely different method. But I recommend turning them off there. I do also recommend aging them on your videos as well. So unless your video is like continuing to go viral and it's growing and there's comments happening all the time, or it has really timeless advice and information, then you can leave it there. But if you're starting, if it's starting to degrade in its value, because the more views, here's what happens. The more views, the more shares, the more your video is going viral, the more spam comments you get. Because now somebody wants to troll on your success and they want to be seen interacting with someone who's popular. And so it is a strategy for doing that. And that can eventually harm your channel rankings and all other things. So like, so we just, I like to age it out after a certain point. But if it's not happening, keep them live, keep your comments good. So that's some of the areas. So the only other thing that I really want to mention is just understanding what spam type comments look like. Very often they are not complete thoughts. They're kind of like a phrase that doesn't make sense. They throw in a product name, a company name, a link.

Well, links are the most prevalent spam ones.

I don't see many of the people who are practicing this actually be any good at it. Like, that's what's really kind of shocking. So when you go, that's just weird. That doesn't make sense. It's probably spam, right?

And really website owners are just unsuspecting victims. When they have comments turned on and they're not moderating them. Any bot can go add a comment and boom, for a period of time, they're going to have a backlink from your website to theirs, which is really what they're trying to do. They care very little about it being a good comment. They're just trying to go for volume and get as many comments and links back to their site as they can in a very short period of time.

And so that's why you do have a setting in your blog posts where you can keep comments open for X number of days. So you can keep them open for 10 days, 7 days, 30 days, I'm going to say anything less than 30 days. If you go longer than 30 days, then those bots will kick in because they will have found the popularity of your post because it's been ranked by then. But if you keep it the first 10 days and it's for your community. You'll get most of the comments right when you publish something. And so that is okay in that model. So that's why I recommend turning them off. I don't recommend, like I said, turning them off, ignoring them on. On videos. Unless you really just aren't getting the engagement that you need over there. Go and your topic, it's just all spam happening over there. Then start to turn them off. When it hits that tipping point where everything starts to be spam, you just turn it off. It doesn't always happen unless you really get a popular video. Like, it just won't happen in the early days of anything. It's just not enough for the spam people to worry about. That being said, it did happen to a couple people because their topic area was high and their channel was ranked high. And so every time they published a video, someone was already starting to go in and do spam comments. So they had it set for any time this channel posts a new video and it was doing harmful things to their channel.

I think anybody who gets really, really big is going to face those sorts of challenges. Right? It's just going to happen. Although a link from a YouTube video, I don't know that if that's as valuable as other kinds of links on the Internet. I have to think about that one.

Yeah. Look, it's okay to disagree. It's not okay to be spammed and be hated, be haters. Like, that's just not good. It doesn't help you get more business, doesn't help you get more listeners if you're not staying true to who you are, if you are a hater, like, if that's what your show is all about, then that's what your comments and engagement will be all about. So you better be willing to dive into it and fuel it. So you're going to fuel whatever's going on in your engagement. And it can be good, bad, or weird. Like, that's totally up to you how that happens. But ignoring it, not doing anything with that engagement is wasting the value of what you've done, the value of your listeners. When they know you're not listening back to them, they're out of there. They're going to find somebody new. So a real influencer engages. And if you want to be more than just a podcaster, you want to be a coach, you want to be a business that people want to do business with, you have to see them. And engagement is one of the ways to do that.

Great point, Tracy. Thanks so much for Sharing that, you know, you really are. I was telling you before we started recording this that you really are the expert in this area for us. But then you pointed out. Yeah, but I'm not. I'm never on Facebook. You. Are you engaged there? I don't. I mean, it's interesting. We each sort of have different areas. We engage in this.

So, yeah, I mean, look, it's. I engage in something that seems worthwhile to me. The only place that I do engage is on. I do it as a favor, as a give back on for whenever I'm on someone's show because I want to pattern a behavior of how I would like them to act towards me. Right. But everything else that I do will only happen on LinkedIn because it is the only place that I spend time in.

Yeah, that's your primary one. And it's one that I'm getting more and more into, which is just a natural part of doing business these days. So I've been engaging a lot more.

What I find is that a lot of times over there, if you get somebody's published, publish something, as you know, they. I was interviewed on the show and they get some engagement going on. A lot of times people are not disagreeing with you. They're not understanding. Because an interview is just like a drop in the bucket, right. Like it's not the whole story. This is a great time to invite them to a conversation. So you can take them off of that engagement in the comments and bring them into your DM and then bring them into a meeting with you. How amazing is that? That's what the point of publicity from being a guest on somebody's podcast. So if you're not. If your guests are not engaging, they're actually wasting their publicity ability. Because that's my audience. That is, you've been a guest on my show and there's engagement going on. That's my audience. Those are people who don't know you yet. So that's where I see that we're really. That engagement piece. When you are not participating in that as a guest, you're actually losing out. And if you're a podcast host and you're not engaging your guests and kind of forcing that engagement, you're not doing right by them as well. And it's going to come back to you.

It sure is. All right, well, I think that's a great place to wrap this episode up. Remember, listeners, you can find the blog post for this episode with links to anything we discussed, other references, or the video. If you're listening to this as a podcast on podcasters united.org, so check that out and we'll be back next time. Thanks so much. It's been Tom and Tracy on feed.

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