On Developing Relationships Online II
Image by WisDoc
Engaging interactions with the right people with opinions formed around your brand is, plainly said, an easy task, especially when you’ve implemented effective SEO measures to your Web site or blog for search engines to index. This is made even easier if you’ve also included social media marketing into your campaign and you can boost it with the countless messaging platforms, news aggregators and third party tools and services to guide you along the way. What really needs works most of the time is developing an actual meaningful relationship with them.
Previously, we suggested that, in order to get the ball rolling, you prune your followers to target the right market and to create valuable content to give them something to look forward to. This week we’ve added a few more suggestions.
Moderate- your comments section
If your blogging service or CMS (content management system) structure allows it, always enable comment monitoring. It will enable you to filter what gets out-this is not to say that you should delete negatively written valid comments (which is not a good practice to get into), it just means that you’ll have enough time to think about a proper response as you approve them.
When scanning through your list of comments to be approved, always read thoroughly to understand what’s in plain sight and to be able to read between the lines to catch spammers, comment bots and trolls.
Some spammers, on the other hand, have fallen into the unscrupulous act of masquerading as bona fide comments. In this case, your tell-tale signs include badly composed sentences riddled with equally bad grammar and spelling, links that are irrelevant and randomly appear and unnecessarily repeated sentences.
Jump In- be a part of the discussion
While your content has indeed elicited some considerable amount of comments from your readers, it is not communication’s last stop, and there are no reasons why it should be. Regularly publishing blog posts (or starting message board thread topics) means presenting it as an open platform for discussion; as such it also should not be a one-way street.
As a general rule, possible question, inquiries and compliments should be addressed; it would also be preferable if the person who wrote the content in question would be the one to personally respond. It validates the commenter’s opinions and makes their effort to voice out on your blog a worthwhile activity. This generates a better chance of return visits and increased site traffic with the commenters suggesting your blog to their friends. Be consistent in doing these (in addition to frequently updating the content) and sooner or later you’ll have a decent following of loyal readers in your hands, readers that can potentially mean more business for the brand.
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RSpears @ May 6, 2010
