Whether on your blog post page or via social media, comments are a welcome indication that you are engaging your audiences. But comments are a double-edged sword. If you consistently put out great content you will get a lot of positive, insightful and flattering feedback. But that is not a guarantee that the comments you receive will be favorable.
You should also expect to get comments that are insulting, mean and even a bit stupid. That is how it is, and it would benefit your online marketing efforts to be able to effectively respond to whatever type of comments you receive.
Besides demonstrating that you have a living, breathing (and, hopefully, passionate) audience that follows your work, you benefit from comments in a couple of other ways.
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Comments help you get better search engine results. The more people leave comments on your blog post, the more copy gets on the page. The more text you have on the blog post page, the higher the chances that long-tail keywords will get mentioned. The more keywords in your page, the better its chances of ranking very well in search engine results. You get the picture.
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Comments can help generate more traffic. With higher search engine results rankings, there is a greater probability of attracting traffic to your blog or website.
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Comments help "uncover" your audience. Each comment is like a doorway that opens up tremendous engagement opportunities for you into your targets and prospects. Legitimate comments reveal people's sentiments and allow them to share their ideas with you. This is priceless interaction!
Here are a few quick tips to guide you in responding to comments.
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Pick your battles. There's no sugarcoating it; when you have to respond to many, many comments, the process is a huge pain! But it is a pain well worth experiencing, for reasons already explained above (and many more not mentioned here). So choose which ones need to be addressed and respond to them. Take note of those questions that recur, and perhaps create a FAQ that discusses the specific issue.
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Build resources to help you handle comments. You will encounter recurring feedback. If you detect that a particular issue concerns many people, perhaps include this in an FAQ that you can quickly share as your response to the feedback.
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Make it short and sweet. You don't want this to take up much of your time, so you will want to keep the conversation as brief as possible, without appearing overtly curt or dismissive. When dealing with negative comments, especially, you may want to offer another communication channel where the sender can take up the matter with you, "offline."
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Be gracious and positive. Even if only a few people leave comments, there are probably dozens more who are concerned with the same issue and they will be paying close attention on how you respond to the feedback. This is a great opportunity for you to show that you care about what people think and that you are at least willing to give some thought to what they tell you.