Engaging with other people will drive more eyeballs to your product
I had an interesting thought today while I was reading some comments on a post of mine. I realized that I was hovering over the usernames of commenters and checking out who they were and what they were building. This leads me to an interesting conclusion. When you comment on other peoples' posts, besides for becoming a more active member in the community, you are also potentially driving more traffic to your own product since people are interested in who are the people interacting with them.
So even if you're not feeling like putting in the effort of creating a longer-form post, drop a comment or two on some posts you find interesting for a lower effort, but still rewarding interaction.
Interesting opinion!
Currently I'm testing your theory while I'm talking about this with my co-founder, while we are working on Howitzer - the first direct marketing tool for Reddit, made for Entrepreneurs, Startups and Growth Hackers! :P
#just_kiddin'
Sorry to inform you that your comment won't work for me since I already saw your post about using your own tool to get leads. Impressive work!
Thanks Jacob! :)
Haha, Im doing the exact same thing (sometimes even before reading their comment).
I also think that this is a really important point since I tend to see more and more self-promotional posts on the IH-forum. It's important that we continue to give value to the community and not only use it to promote our own product.
This is exactly correct
Yup, it really does work. It's not a fast churn, so it wont' be overnight, but the people who do follow you, will be far more engaged and that really is the name of the game! :)
I come across this advice on Twitter a lot recently. Engaging with others, supporting them, and commenting on their posts/tweets seems as important, if not more so, than creating original content. Helps you build connections first instead of throwing things out there in hopes of “building an audience”.
That's super interesting! It was just a thought that occurred to me randomly, but it's nice to see that I wasn't off base with it.
Definitely right on base! Daniel Vassallo talks about something similar in his Twitter course.
building a community > building an audience
It works even more if you have a profile pic and you're attractive 😜
Haha, that's pretty universal. I must say though, you're looking pretty good with that green background :)
Great suggestion! I never thought about that, but as you can see from the comments on this post, this definitely works :) Thanks for your insight, Jacob!
This is absolutely true, and that is something you can do on several platforms to increase your chances of being seen. The ones I think work well are Indie Hackers and Product Hunt, maybe Twitter, and I think Hacker News and Reddit have some potential, but people are less inclined to reply for some reason. What about you, where do you find it easier to actually be active with the community?
Well at the moment I've just started with IH, so I'll have to see where to go from here.
Absolutely true. I do the same when I’m commenting a post.
I notice this, I just post the pre-launch of my platform and that same day I get responses of all kinds and in someway even by engaging with them they could be future customers.
helping others helps yourself. it's kinda magical.
The important question is: What car do the eyeballs drive? 🤔
This is 100% true if its honest, meaningful, and constructive interactions.
What platforms have you had the biggest success on engagement these interactions? IH? Twitter? Product Hunt?
I've found engagement on IH to be lower volume, but more meaningful.
Twitter is more engagement, but way less meaningful.
Brand new to product hunt, so we will see.
So far the only community I'm active in is IH, but I'm slowly branching out to other platforms.
I'm in the same dilemma, Am building in public here in IH but I thing that people get more engagement in Twitter.
I have been using Linkedin mainly which is pretty good if you are building a B2B platform but not really meaningful so I'm giving a go at IH.
Yep absolutely, this is how I got my first whopping 8 followers on Twitter 😄