Talk To Your Fans With Social: Bookmarking Your Best Comments

One of the most wonderful — and frustrating — elements of dealing with social media is the entirely open-ended nature of the interactions, and more specifically your opportunities to interact with the interactions themselves. That was awfully vague, so let’s make an example here to illustrate:

You post an announcement on a social site — say, you update your Facebook page to let your players know that you’re releasing a new level for your iOS zombie combat app. You get a few dozen Likes and several dozen comments, one of which turns out to be a long and loving critique of your existing levels and some suggestions for your new one.

What do you do with that? You could just leave it there. You could Like it. But this is the world of social media, my friend: your options are endless. If you really want to encourage this level of interaction from your crowd (and you should!), show them you mean it by putting a big-ass spotlight on that comment. Like it, Tweet it, and then take it to social bookmarking and hit it with a Pin, a Digg, and a Reddit.

What does that do for you? It certainly doesn’t have any immediate, cost-benefit-analysis kind of repercussions — it’s several minutes of relative downtime for you and a huge ego boost for some kid who happens to love your work. But this is the world of social media, my friend: every action has a consequence. When you go out of your way to highlight something you enjoy, you show your crowd what you want to see out of them — and assuming that they like you in the first place, they’re going to produce more of the same.

This can actually start to look like a passable organic SEO strategy: if you start highlighting people’s backlinks to you and making a big deal out of them, more people will backlink to you, hoping for a bit of your attention. However you play it, just remember that there are always ways to manipulate the social scene and get your fans to play along.

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