There are certain actions you can take, to grow rapidly as a person, to accelerate business growth, while having a lot of fun. I’m going to list 17 benefits of doing one such action, trying not to sound boring – YouTube comments.
The answer lies in simple, yet often overlooked segment of YouTube: Comment section. Posting thousands of replies on YT, other social media as well, showed me how powerful this strategy is, especially for new channels to grow.
I’ll assume everyone, by now, knows what YouTube comment section is, but you may be unaware of the enormous treasure that lies hidden, right in front of our eyes.
The main benefit of actively engaging in the YouTube comments section
The saying goes… that our main goal, when posting replies on YouTube videos, is to get eyeballs to our YT channel. Further benefits (business-wise) come naturally with more attention.
Some comments just, naturally, get plenty of likes. These comments are shown to more and more people as the video ages.
There’s a big difference, whether you’re commenting on Standard videos VS Shorts, which we’ll discuss in a different post. Long story short, Shorts comments have better viral potential.
17 Benefits Of Actively Engaging In YouTube Comments Section
Besides the main benefit, there are so many side bonuses, that your mind is going to blow up. Here’s a quick list, for those that are impatient:
- Audience expansion – brand awareness
- Build relationships – collaborations
- Establish authority -> boost credibility -> gain trust -> sales
- Learn with feedback – master the art of comment writing
- Networking opportunities – show you’re an active member
- Understand trends – discover niches
- SEO benefits for your channel
- Provoke audience engagement – spark conversations
- Get content inspiration – content gaps
- Viewer insights – understand what people like/dislike
- Improve your writing and public speaking – grow vocabulary
- Get better at problem solving – practice crisis management
- Improve your mood – develop patience, tolerance, gratitude…
- Experience different languages and cultures – learn languages
- Take your humor to the next level – improve overall communication
- Discover new tools and resources – real time feedback
- Meet different perspectives
Are you ready to explore these life enhancers even further? Leeet’s go.
1. Audience expansion – brand awareness
As I mentioned earlier, if you post comments, you put your name out there (name of your brand). People notice these comments and, once in a while, someone visits your profile because you took 30 seconds to write a sentence.
Do this on a larger scale, actively engaging in lots of comment sections, and you’ll spread your web wide and far. This web, like a giant spider web, serves to catch curious comment section scrollers.
This is absolutely amazing growth strategy, that requires time though, and that’s why it’s a gold mine. People are lazy! They won’t do it. You do it!
If you’re a small channel, deeply in mud, can’t grow, then you must use this strategy to your advantage. This works! Many people did this before me, it’s not my invention.
2. Build relationships – collaborations
Most of us don’t just go to random videos and post useless comments. We watch videos we like, and engage in these comment sections. Usually, it’s a small group of 5-10 channels we watch regularly.
If you’re constantly posting comments on particular channels, you might get noticed by the creators. This could lead to an amazing world of opportunities.
These gems come in form of forging stronger relationships with other business people, as well as collaboration projects. We all know how important it is to grow your network, which we’ll discuss more in a moment.
3. Establish Authority -> Boost Credibility -> Gain Trust -> Sales
This may seem like one benefit, but all of these are separate entities.
Firstly, by showing your expertise on the subject (+ crafting a banger of a comment), you may establish authority on the subject immediately. Even in the first interaction, the right person will understand the value in your writing, thus consider you somewhat knowledgeable.
Secondly, a person may read your conversation, where you posted 3 or 4 good replies, or visit your YouTube channel page, watch a video, or 5. This may result in some credibility boost in this person’s eyes, so, eventually, you can move them to the phase 3.
Thirdly, over time, and with more valuable content, people will start trusting you, and may even consider your products as an option, now, or in the future. At that point, it’s all about building that trust higher, with strong foundation, which leads to point number 4.
Fourthly, if people need what you offer + they understand they need it + no cash problems = they will put money into your virtual pockets. It’s really that simple!
4. Learn with Feedback – Master the Art of Comment Writing
Whatever you do, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Same applies to YouTube comments.
I did it thousands of times, got much better at it, you can do it to. Consider it as a fun game, where you also advance skills, including crafting good comments, and writing as well, which we’ll cover later.
5. Networking Opportunities – Show You’re an Active Member
There are certain YouTube profiles, that you may frequently notice commenting in different comment sections. Your avatar should become exactly that thing that’s just everywhere. You should be the one that’s noticed all over the place.
When people see you posting many comments, they will perceive you as an active member of the community, not just some content machine. People (not all, for sure) like genuine people.
It’s easier to stand out in comment sections with not so much competition, or jumping early, soon after the video was posted.
If you’re smart, you should have Instagram profile, and link to IG on your YouTube channel page. Website contact form works, but Instagram is where business inquiries happen, LinkedIn as well. Availability can be your secret ingredient, that can help you grow your network.
6. Understand trends – discover niches
Whether you’re just minding your own business, or managing a farm of websites, it pays to understand where the world is going, what’s considered popular.
YouTube comment section is a treasure trove for insights on current trends, but also a gold mine for discovering different niches. There’s just so much diversity in this place.
People will often mention similar channels, suggest good videos, recommend books, complain what the author missed, search for the meaning of life and, of course, don’t forget spam.
7. SEO benefits for your channel
Doing my research on benefits of writing YouTube comments, my AI assistant buddy said SEO benefits, and it stood out, sounded weird at first. All the other options immediately seemed like a perfect fit for the article.
To clear this out for you, if you found yourself in the same situation, YouTube measures what you do in the app. If you spend time, watch videos, comment, they will push your content accordingly (I believe so).
One other potential SEO benefit, in my opinion, is the vast number of backlinks to your YouTube channel page. Each comment creates one such link.
8. Provoke audience engagement – spark conversations
Sometimes, when we forget about ourselves for a moment, and focus on others, life rewards us with most beautiful outcomes. This is one side effect of posting a comment: interesting conversations start.
You may, or may not, continue to engage in the conversation. Nevertheless, the snowball started rolling, and some interesting opinion exchanges might take place.
One thing that comes from these conversations is potential for more profile visits. The other is creating like a mini-thread, where simply many people join the conversation, and have a good time doing so.
Make people joyous, post comments. A good slogan. When we get to number 13 on our list, you’ll see how this can benefit you, in a similar way.
[See related article: Maximizing Social Media Engagement]
9. Get content inspiration – content gaps
An experienced commenter would know this, but let’s bring it out there. YouTube comment section has a lot to offer when it comes to finding content ideas.
What’s even better, is that you can find plenty of people complaining about the lack of coverage on a certain topic in your niche. That’s your VIP pass.
It’s not even that hard to find unicorn topics, if you know where to look. And how.
10. Viewer insights – understand what people like/dislike
This one is very much in alignment with the previous benefit. Besides getting a ton of content ideas, you’ll also discover what people like or dislike about the video. Take those notes.
One thing many people complain on is audio quality, which is vital to success of a video. You may also find people complaining about speaking too fast, too slow, too little action, too much action, and so on.
All of these comments, on our videos and other channels’ videos, can provide you with insight on making better videos.
11. Improve your writing and public speaking – grow vocabulary
Writing and speaking go hand in hand. We, humans, associate written words with sounds, visual with auditory.
Even if you aren’t necessarily yelling out loud each word in YouTube comments, your speaking level grows, writing gets sharper, and vocabulary is expanding. It’s not like you have to do anything special, the learning comes from doing, like in all spheres of life.
Long form content has its benefits, when it comes to getting better at writing, but collective effort of piles of comments can throw a punch. Practicing how to express opinions with “limited” characters, forces us to come up with creative ways to write in less words.
12. Get better at problem solving – practice crisis management
The mere decision to engage in YouTube comments, carries with itself the fact that you’ll solve problems. First problem is coming up with a relevant comment.
Now, not only relevancy matters, the comment has to stand out in some way. One way is through a sheer knowledge bomb, you can put a list, bold letters, or any other attention-grabbing method.
As the conversation heats up, how do you react? Run, fight, put out the fire? All of them are viable solutions, depending on situation. Most importantly, entering into arguments and debates will make you better equipped to handle such situations in the future.
Yes, even such a menial YouTube discussion can have a profound impact on your negotiation skills, handling people with absence of intelligence, and prepare you to deal with life situations effortlessly.
13. Improve your mood – develop patience, tolerance, gratitude…
We’ve already covered so much in this article, it’s getting hot! What’s getting cool is… your temperament as you engage in more YouTube conversations.
In the previous benefit I mentioned how you get better at solving problems. One crucial aspect of being able to deal with difficulties, on day-to-day basis, is being level-headed.
You can’t make good decisions when you can’t control your thoughts. Writing plenty of well-thought-out YouTube comments may transform you into a Shaolin monk level of calmness. If you try hard enough.
14. Experience different languages and cultures – learn languages
Some videos are created for global understanding, they make people around the world laugh, or think. These videos, naturally, attract comments from any country you can think of.
Being a passionate language learner (English and one more learned to native level, 3 really good), I can assure you that many lessons I received happened exactly in the haven of YouTube comments. Especially English, which BTW contains many languages within itself.
Through comments, I’ve studied gaming language, languages of different sports, business, pets, slang, agriculture, and so on. Each of these languages is a subset of English, containing specific phrases and terminology.
Tell us down in the comments, how many languages do you speak, and have you used YouTube comments as a learning tool?
15. Take your humor to the next level – improve overall communication
You may not become Jim Carrey, but you can certainly try your best. By being exposed to humor, you just get better at grasping different types of humor. I’d say there’s plenty of jokes in YouTube comments.
Humor isn’t a constant. It’s a variable that takes infinite number of parameters into the equation. It changes from era to era, culture to culture, person to person. You and I… we all have unique jokes that work only with a handful of people in our lives.
As a consequence of this complexity, the point is clear. There’s no limit on how much you can improve the level of your humor, so get creative with comments, activate some smiles.
One thing to note is that humoristic comments get the most engagement, but it rarely ever impacts business results significantly. Perhaps, over a long term it does, who knows?
16. Discover new tools and resources – real time feedback
Sometimes, I’m searching for a tutorial on how to use a program, an app… Then, I watch a video, quickly realize it’s not what I need, and scroll down to comment section.
In comment section, one may find recommendations for different tools that fulfil the same function, better tools, cheaper tools… You may also find suggestions for a better tutorial for the current tool you’re trying to learn.
All in all, one extra plus for the benefits of YouTube comments. This place rocks!
17. Meet different perspectives
You’re going to argue with people in comments. Unless you want to miss the amazing opportunity to learn what the other side has to say.
I can’t consider myself a savvy student of Stoicism, but I watched a video or two on TikTok. One of the main principles is to seek different opinions in life. This expands your character, makes you a more grounded person.
Believe it or not, YouTube comments is one awesome playground for you to find people who think differently. Reddit as well. There are always trolls, of course, that’s the nature of the game. Nevertheless, we should focus on the positive side of it.
Always look on the bright side of life, sang the Monty Python lads way before I was born, and so should we embrace this opportunity to understand how people think, dive into psychology, and so on.
Wrapping things up
It’s crystal clear, that there’s more to YouTube comments than simply reaching more people. They’re a powerful tool of modern entrepreneurs, who are willing to sacrifice a bit of time for massive personal development.
Are you that entrepreneur?
Writing, speaking, thinking, creativity, ideation, just to name a few, are skills that you can practice daily, and should practice daily. Not only that, but your business may grow exponentially as a direct consequence of being an active member of community.
If you reached this far, I’m honored that my writing inspired you to get a better perspective on the topic we discussed. Keep doing what works, and life’s quite easy.
[Recommended reading: Seven Fantastic Tips How To Enhance Your YouTube Views And Audiences]
[Image credits – Main image: Foap; other images are from their respective websites and/or social platforms or articles]
Entrepreneur with a decade+ of experience in business, focused on educating new generation of entrepreneurs about best practices in business. Founder of Entrepreneur Homage, a place where anyone can sharpen their entrepreneurship skills and get inspired by stories of legendary entrepreneurs.