The failure that I'll be talking about can kill your tribe.
Not all at once, not even quickly, but slowly and painfully.
The good news is that it's completely avoidable, and only takes a marginal effort above the work you're already doing to produce the content in the first place.
I've watched tribes of mine slowly wither on the vine.
The failure I'm talking about is ignoring the people that are actively paying attention to you online.
I started blogging (on WordPress) back in 2005. The commenting was generally more active back then. I got to a point where I was getting a constant stream of commenters coming to my articles and leaving their thoughts.
What happened was that I got too comfortable with this, and just stopped commenting back. Eventually my commenters stopped leaving comments, and then I just stopped getting comments altogether.
It's more than a little painful to look back on posts I've written over a decade ago and see comments on there with no response from me.
Many, many posts that got attention at one point, but no longer.
“You're not monopolizing the conversation.”
It isn't merely blogs that this applies to. It also extends to Facebook groups.
One of my Facebook groups is very large, and has been running without my constant attention, so I don't need to respond to every post and every comment anymore there.
My online presence Facebook group though, is much smaller: only 18 members at the moment.
One of the members DM'd me and said that they were concerned that there were monopolizing the conversation. More to the point, there isn't a whole lot of engagement at the moment.
I responded to this person and told them that I love and appreciate the conversation that's going on.
That's why I take the time to respond when people take the time to leave a comment — whether it's a blog, a YouTube video, Medium, Substack, whatever.
Commenting is important for longer than you might think.
Once somebody gets to be A-lister popular, it is difficult to respond to every comment the same way that they could when they were just building out there audience and their platform.
My failure at the time was to think that I was a bigger deal than I actually was. I recognize now that I hadn't gotten to that point yet and I was just being lazy. And it cost me the majority of my following.
Treat your commenters with the respect they deserve and nurture those conversations. They're more likely to stay your fans and perhaps grow into collaborators.
For further reading
Check out this article for more detail about the dangers of not returning comments:
Avoid this tribe-killer to keep your platform healthy
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I'm John and I encourage people to work for themselves, and on themselves, every day to sleep better at night.
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