How to Best Leverage Comments to Grow Your Following
Don't get caught up in a "battle thread," that's a complete waste of your time
Hello Everyone!
The news from the frozen north is that we’re finally seeing some warmer weather. As I write this, it’s 19 degrees and partly cloudy. That might not qualify as “warm” to many of you, but it’s a lot better than the -7 degree mornings we’ve been getting lately.
I like living in a place with snow, but the sub zero days are hard on me. For one thing, the dry air causes the skin on my knuckles to crack open and bleed. That’s no good for typing. Last night, I had to dab at the cuts with Neosporin and cover the wounds with band aids. How we suffer for our art!
The art of the comment
Today, I wanted to say a few words about leaving and answering comments. On Medium in particular, comments offer an opportunity to build a following, but you have to hold yourself to a certain standard of etiquette.
I think that often, there’s an impulse to “correct” a writer on their theme to show your “value” as a reader. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. There’s this weird psychological quirk that makes you think people will respect you and be in awe of you if you tell them that they’re wrong.
Newsflash: they don’t. In fact, people don’t like it at all.
It’s kind of sad really because every now and then I get comments from people who I think are trying to impress me by demonstrating what a fool I am. I guess I’m supposed to say, “Thank you! You’ve revealed to me that you should be the one with 40K followers, and I should be the one with 10! I wish there were some way to trade places with you, how about if I give you my log in and you can write from this moment forward as me?”
As embarrassing as it is, I want to emphasize that this used to be my mindset. I’ve moved on from thinking that way, and I think follower growth has been one of the natural results. One of the related things I’ve learned is that you have to also overcome the impulse to tell the people that leave comments that they are wrong.
Remind yourself to be grateful for the interaction
I think the inner dialogue that serves to sabotage writers goes like this, “They already think I’m smart, but let me show them that I’m even more smart than they think by nitpicking every little thing they say.”
Don’t do that either.
The other day, I had a guy with 200 followers tell me that I needed to “do more showing and less telling” in one of my articles. Awesome! Thanks for sharing the most tired writing advice in the history of literature. But I didn’t say that, instead I wrote, “That’s very helpful, thanks for your comment!”
That’s the key. Unless somebody is being truly rude, you should always thank them for taking the time to leave you a comment. Sometimes that requires kicking your brain out of a rut, but getting all worked up over a comment normally isn’t worth your energy.
I’ve said this before but it is worth repeating, if you find yourself becoming really angry don’t write a long comment, write an article!
Turn your irritation into something positive
For those of you who are short on daily inspiration, I advise you to develop the habit of turning your irritation into prose. It works wonders for me. Half the time I wake up in the morning with nothing to write about and all I have to do is look at the idiotic headlines. The things that our media considers worthy of serious discussion is absolutely asinine. It’s worth learning a foreign language just so you don’t have to read awful American “reporting.”
Write an article. Don’t leave 1,000 word comments.
The rule to remember is that comments aren’t a place to show off how smart you are. Comments are for praise only. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Comments also aren’t for requests
The other thing that too many people do is they leave what appears to be an AI generated text and then follow it up with “I’d appreciate if you’d check out the articles I’ve published.”
Grrr... don’t do that. It always comes across as insincere. I much prefer when people just leave the link to the article they want me to read. The generic, “please do me the favor of reading one of my articles because I’ve read one of yours” feels too transactional. Use a little bit of salesmanship at least! If you write, “Reading your article inspired me to write this!” and then you leave a link, that’s flattering. If you do that, be sure to include the hyperlink to my profile in the article so I see it.
I won’t block a person for asking me to check out their profile, but really you’re not helping yourself. In order for comments to be a pathway to follower growth, you have to leave sincere comments.
One of the best things to do if you’re new to Medium is to check out the staff pick articles every day and leave a comment. In my early days, I received thousands of views just from comments. Actually, this is something that I need to get back to doing. The staff pick section is valuable because it gives you a sense of the type of writing Medium is looking for.
Kristina’s Substack growth spreadsheet
Since we’re on the topic of growth, I wanted to mention an excellent recent article by
. She discusses how the recommend feature on Substack is a great tool for growing your list of followers, and she has a link to a spreadsheet creators can use to find each other. I share this because I’m happy to do recommendation swaps with anyone who is interested.I don’t particularly consider myself an expert on growing a following, but it’s a topic that all writers have to dabble with to some extent. I’d prefer to have a following grow naturally because of the quality of my writing, but that’s not how the modern writing marketplace works. I’ve had articles go viral and get millions of views without capturing any new followers. The simple truth is that you have to put out some kind of a net or all your potential readers are going to float on by.
To sum-up, leave comments on staff pick articles, make sure your comments are polite, and leave polite responses to all the comments you receive. Don’t get into comment battles, that’s a complete waste of your time, and it will hurt your ability to capture followers.
Stay warm everyone! As always, leave your comments below!
I only comment if there's a reason for me to do so. And usually it's because I like the piece and want to tell that to the writer, not rag on them. I don't deliberately seek out places to be a troll.
And I think it has worked. My relationship with most of the people I have interacted with most strongly began this way.
(BTW: I think this approach can also work for Substack and Vocal as well as Medium).
I'm glad you wrote this Walter. I cannot count the number of times I have checked out a profile because of an insightful or brilliant comment. But I can honestly say I have never checked out a profile because someone asked me to. Medium isn't Facebook. People need to learn that. Have an actual conversation. Add something. People will check out the person who does that.