There are many different kinds of content you can add to the social web: articles/posts, status updates, comments, shares, likes, etc. One of the most visible and potentially useful can be the comment. Comments don’t take much time to make (much less than a full article/post) and all sites from social media sites, to blogs, to news sites allow commenting.
But what does it take to have your comment noticed? The most important thing, above all else, is to get your comment in early! Have you seen the comment sections on massively popular news sites CNN or the Huffington Post? Any major story might have 10,000 comments! If you’re not on the first page of the comments you might as well be on the last. The first posts are always read more, even on sites which show last comments first (because most have the option to still see first comments first, and many people choose that option).
So with this in mind, you should:
- Look for opportunities to be first
- Turn down opportunities to be last
Post on Pre-Release / Trending Content
Many sites let registered or paid members see content before the hoi polloi (the great unwashed masses). So register for those sites and view and comment on the pre-released, ideally “trending” content which you can tell will likely go live and thrive because of popularity. This way you’ll be guaranteed to be one of the first comments for potentially thousands of viewers. Of course this strategy only brings you direct benefits if a user is likely to wind up on your personal or money site (site which you financially benefit from, a blog with ads, an affiliate link, whatever) because of content in your comment or links in your user profile on that site (many sites do NOT have such options).
Build a Reputation to Get your Comments Read, Liked and Visible
Some sites automatically give higher visibility to comments from more connected members, either by promoting them in a special section or promoting them to their connections who may like your comments and thus raise their visibility for all. In these cases, try to get your account the friends / reputation it needs to be more effective.
Spot Fresh Posts via Feedly
Using a news aggregating tool like Feedly is hugely important if you want to be be early to an article.
Configure Feedly as you want, with all the news sources and blogs that are relevant to your areas of interest and watch Feedly for recently posted articles. When you see one, pounce! See how many people beat you to commenting on the article, and then post away if there aren’t too many comments.
As you can see in this screen capture, the feeds show how many minutes or hours since the articles were published. So get in early!