Reaching out to your target audience is the best way to get comments and encourage customer interactions with your brand. Here are seven tips to increase the volume of comments you recieve:

1. Ask for them. At the end of your articles ask a question or mention that you value feedback from your customers. Promise to get them speedy answers or responses to their requests.
2. Ask open-ended questions. Nothing stops a conversation more than a “yes or no” question. Ask open-ended questions to encourage in-depth answers, such as “If you could change something about our product, what would it be?”.
3. Comment on the comments. Give responses as quickly as you can to inspire a customer to engage in a dialog with you. Comment on every comment you get to encourage others to answer as well.
4. Be genuine. Personalize your responses, seem excited and sign your name. Being human is a beneficial aspect of social media.
5. Stir the pot sometimes. Perhaps a conflict with your brand or company was in the news recently or you can provoke a conversation about a touchier topic. Stirring the pot with questions or asking “Do you think we handled this well?” can shake things up and get your audience involved.
6. Make commenting a participatory game. Give small incentives for commenting on a post. State that the best comments from the post will be highlighted on the homepage, added to a blog, or will win a prize. Have a question and answer session, live chat or ask customers to creatively post 10 times using a certain hashtag to win a prize.
7. Make commenting easy. Check out your commenting structure. Does it require a log in, a large form to be completed, or comment mediation? Most customers will see these as roadblocks and not bother commenting. Some may even think they didn’t post correctly if their comment doesn’t appear right away. Make your comment process streamlined and simple. We suggest asking for an email to pull in their gravatar photo but not making it mandatory since many people hesitate to give out their email. Asking for just a first name and a comment will encourage more customers to engage.