Outbound Social Engagement: How Commenting on Posts Builds Stronger Reach

This is an edited excerpt from the chapter on Outbound Engagement in Social First Brands.

If it seems like you’re seeing a lot more brands in comment sections these days, you’re not imagining it. Part of being chronically online has meant that brands are not only listening in on comment sections, but joining them. This practice—called outbound engagement, or outbound community engagement—is one of the easier ways to start engaging in sub-communities and larger cultural conversations.

The thesis of outbound engagement is simple: By actively comment­ing on popular content where a brand’s audience might be spending their time, you can add to the experience while giving your brand one more touchpoint to grow awareness and relevance. The reason this can be effective is that when a brand leaves an especially good comment that inspires engagement and keeps the conversation going, the comment can shoot toward the top of the comment section. And that is valuable real estate on posts that go viral.

With people spending more time than ever in the comments, and platforms prioritizing them more, brands have a chance to be seen by millions of people with outbound engagement. From a broader marketing perspective, there are a few strategic goals the practice can help accomplish:

• you can reach more consumers who are aligned with your brand;
• you can drive more profile visits when you pique people’s curiosity with your comments, which leads to more follows and link in bio clicks;
• you can discover crucial insights that other teams in the company can learn from;
• being quick to spot the latest conversations and trends can inform the brand’s own messaging and content;
• for emerging brands that don’t have the budget to compete with the big players, it’s a cost-effective way to accelerate relevance.

While outbound engagement is a cost-effective practice, it still requires daily dedication. For brands that don’t want to be left out of relevant conversations on social, outbound engagement is a full-time job. Some companies have hired multiple employees who spend a good chunk of their work week scrolling through social feeds, analyzing internet trends, and looking for content for the brand to engage with.

And if that seems ridiculous, I’m guessing you don’t work for a Social First Brand. We do outbound engagement for a few clients, and my engagement specialist can easily spend her entire week on it. Because the internet doesn’t sleep, it’s one of those projects that can scale as you want. Do you want to leave 10 outbound comments per week on other people’s posts? Spend an hour. Want to show up in hundreds or thousands of comment sections? Hire a dedicated resource.

No matter the effort, there are a few things brands should know before jumping into outbound engagement.

1. It needs to be more than a miscellaneous task you’re doing only because you want consumers to follow you or buy your product. Consumers are quick to sniff out a brand’s intentions, and you’ll lose all credibility if you think you can hack your way to success here.
2. Brevity is important. Based on research from Hootsuite, comments between 20 and 50 characters drive the most engagement for our clients but I’ve seen others say anywhere between 10 and 99 characters works well.
3. You don’t need to aim purely for laughs or shock value. So many brands are competing to be the funniest or most unhinged, but we’ve learned that there’s a huge opportunity to be helpful, warm, and encouraging. When I analyze our outbound engagement reports for clients, I frequently see that we generate the most engagement by commenting brief notes of positivity. For instance, the most engaged-with comment in the past year was about being able to feel the love in the room.
4. Don’t post emoji-only comments. They don’t add anything to the conversation, they don’t spark engagement, and they’re a waste of time for everybody.
5. You don’t need existing brand name recognition for this to work. Some people think outbound engagement is only effective if it’s a major brand surprising people by popping up in the comments. But the substance of the message is more important than the name of the brand. For example, in one three-week stretch while writing this book, my team’s community engagement specialist generated nearly 20,000 likes and comments on outbound engagement, plus thousands of curious profile visitors to our client’s page, for a startup brand that had just launched.
6. You need to be fast. If you can catch a post beginning to go viral within the first few hours of it being posted, you have the best chances of your brand’s message claiming the prime real estate atop the comments section. And engagement begins to decrease dramatically if you comment on a post that’s more than 24 hours old.
7. Others can disagree with me on this one, but if a lot of other brands have already commented on it, steer clear. Once a comment section is overrun with brands, it starts to feel too much like a marketing gimmick and can make the brands coming in late look desperate.
8. You need rules of engagement to guide the effort. If there’s no structure to the practice, you open yourself to a host of risks, including saying something that should not have been said, misreading the “room,” or implicitly endorsing someone who your brand would not want to be affiliated with.

Outbound engagement is likely to become a growing marketing prac­tice in the years ahead. We’ve already seen a shift in the weight it receives, with some companies now hiring dedicated teams for it. But the brands that win won’t necessarily be the ones trying to comment with the funniest one-liners or the most epic putdowns. Instead, Social First Brands that stay in their lane and focus on relevance will be the ones that see the best results from this chronically online practice.

And the best way to focus on relevance is to put guardrails on the practice. First, remember that most people aren’t coming to social media to see what brands are saying. Any time you comment on another person’s post, you’re a visitor. So be a good one. And second, searching for viral posts to comment on for the sake of riding virali­ty’s coattails isn’t the point. Outbound engagement should be in service of engaging in your niche’s sub-communities and intersecting culture in the unique ways that only your brand can.

But what does intersecting culture mean in practice? Brands love to talk about the importance of cultural relevance and moving at the speed of culture, but what does that look like? And more impor­tantly, is all this talk about cultural relevance still… relevant?

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