MarketingInsights - GDC Marketing & Ideation

The Four People You Meet In The Comments

If you’re a business owner or marketer on social media, you probably have a love hate relationship with comments. On the one hand, lots of comments mean people are looking at your content, which is great. On the other hand, knowing how to respond or whether or not you should respond to comments can be a little intimidating. We would like to take some of the fear out of responding to the comments you get on your social channels. How you respond to each comment depends on the person you’re responding to. So, what types of people comment on blogs or social posts? At GDC, we’ve found that they generally fall into four categories: cheerleaders, downers, questioners and spammers. Each type requires a unique response. Luckily, we have a lot of experience dealing with commenters on social media pages we help manage for our clients. Through this experience, we’ve developed our own tips for dealing with the four main commenter types.

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Cheerleaders

These people will comment to agree with your blog or post and cheer you on. They’re our favorite type of commenter. These wonderful people often need a little encouragement to keep the praise coming. A cheerleader will appreciate the occasional like from your social page or a grateful response to their blog comment. A simple “Thank you!” from you will inspire them to keep the praise coming. If, on the other hand, they never receive any response from you, their enthusiasm may die out. One day, you may open your socials and wonder where your favorite commenter went. If you thank your cheerleaders, they’ll keep cheering for you.

2. Downers

Negative comments, public blogs, and social posts go hand in hand. Whether it’s someone who had a bad experience with you, someone who disagrees with an opinion you post or someone who’s just plain mean, at some point, you may find a downer swimming in your comments section. Dealing with downers is more complicated than dealing with cheerleaders and not as fun. But, like it or not, you’ll have to deal with them to succeed anywhere on the internet. So, what do you do when you spy a downer? Several things. First and foremost, never delete their comment. This will only make them angrier and make you look like you have something to hide. Next, you should respond directly to their comment. When responding, follow the oldie-but-goody rule: BIFF. Keep it brief, informative, friendly and firm. In the age of social media, it’s best to try to move the conversation off the public platform. Encourage them to send a DM so that you can resolve their issue. Of course, if you get a troll who continually posts offensive comments or makes direct threats, you can block and report them. But the block button should only be a last resort.

3. Questioners

These will be particularly common if you run a social media page for a business. You will often get people who want to know about your business hours, inventory or policies. They will ask these questions in the comments of a silly meme you shared. Why? We may never know. The bad news is you’ll probably have to repeatedly answer the same types of questions. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to answer these questions. The best thing to do is to create a list of the most common questions you receive on your social media page and craft an answer to each that you can use to respond to the questioners. Remember to add a bit of personalization to each comment so it doesn’t look like you’re copying and pasting the same answer.

4. Spammers

Now we come to the final type of person you meet in your comments section. This commenter is either a Nigerian prince, the happy recipient of $5,000 or someone who went to a psychic and got their ex back. These commenters lack specific linguistic skills. Still, they are on fire to tell everyone about their recent good fortune and even more on fire to get your readers to click on a “handy” link they’ve provided. While most of your readers will ignore them, a few may click on the link the spammer gives them and end up with serious security issues. Therefore, these are comments you should delete. If the same comments return to your posts from the same account, block the account and report it to the social channel or blog site.