The Importance of Comments
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 in a given moment.
- Just Be Nice!
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. - Lead a Conversation
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. - Guide them Towards the Next Obvious Offer (Keep this in mind throughout the course)...
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.
That being said, we can automate this process a bit using an app called ManyChat. ManyChat is a 3rd party app that allows you to automate conversations within Facebook Messenger. We’ll be talking about it a bit throughout this training, so I’d recommend taking our Messenger Marketing for Musicians training sooner than later!
One key function of ManyChat is called the Facebook Comments growth tool. This allows us to send messages to people who comment on a post of ours within a time frame that we decide.
This means we can automatically send messages to these commenters using one of the directives I described before, even while we’re asleep. If you’re running a really successful fan finder with more comments than you can keep up with, this tool can help you capitalize on these potential leads by supplementing your manual efforts.
Let me show you how this ManyChat tool works in terms of setup - we’ll get into using it more properly later on in the training when we talk about ManyChat flows. But for now, let’s set up a preliminary Facebook Comments growth tool so we can attach it to the right flow down the line.
- In ManyChat, click “Growth Tools” on the left.
- Click ‘New Growth Tool’ in the top right corner.
- Select Facebook Comments 2.0.
- Select “Specific” under “This Growth Tool will work with…”
- Use the tabs to choose the desired post you’d like to watch for comments.
- Click “track first-level comments only”.
- Type in your desired exclusionary keywords so that the tool won’t fire if a certain word is in the comment.
- Leave “Only trigger for comments with these keywords” blank.
- Click the “Opt-In Actions” tab.
- Edit the opt-in flow to include an message that addresses the fan where they’re at (they commented on your post) and asks them if they’re interested in something further.
- Add a button to this message with an opt-in reply such as “Yes please!”
Click the circle on that reply and drag it out to a new block in the ManyChat flow builder. - Choose “Start a new Flow”
- Select an existing flow that will pick up the conversation.
Alright, now we know the value of comments and how we can interact with them to pull fans deeper into our education phase, and even automate some of that process using ManyChat.
Keeping this in mind, let’s move on to a very germane topic in the next video - messenger conversations! Let’s do it.