How to Develop Your Business in the Comments

What is business development? It’s the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, or relationships. Today I want to discuss why certain comment sections on various platforms are an absolute gold mine for business development.

Developing your business through long-term relationships eventually becomes a vital aspect of building your enterprise. There are no limits to how this can be done, this article here is one of the hundreds of methods to biz dev…but this one is excellent, a perfect 10/10. As with anything worth it, it takes a lot of effort. If anyone ever describes a “method” of growth the way I just did, and it doesn’t take 100 hours of grit work to see results, then it’s a scam.

I would like to start by stating something obvious, yet extremely important to acknowledge: 15 short years ago, the only way to develop your business with long term relationships was to meet people in person or to contact them through a mutual friend via phone or email. It was the opposite of the current state of the internet right now: a cocktail party. It’s quite normal to approach people on the internet being complete strangers, some platforms more than others.

While most of you reading this already understood that last paragraph before you read it, I still think it’s of the utmost importance that we acknowledge how lucky we are to build businesses in this era, because that appreciation will drive you to put more hours in and squeeze this opportunity for everything it’s got.

Now let’s get into the juice. Comment sections on social media for different accounts whether they are a business, a business advice page, or an individual, have a ridiculous amount of value. Let’s use @garyvee who is a very popular businessman. The world just corralled tens of thousands of business owners, future business owners, creators, bloggers, artists, marketers, graphic designers, and on and on and on all in one single place.

Each person who comments on a piece of content relating to business (or get more specific and use a page that is centered around an industry) has something of value to offer the world. Shifting through these comments and genuinely interacting with the ones you want will prove to be a top 5 business decision in hindsight.

If you’re talented, charismatic, and persevere hard enough you will develop relationships with other talented individuals who can greatly help the development of your business- end of story. It’s going to take hours of genuine interaction with strangers in these specific comment sections. Here are my favorite platforms for this: YouTube and LinkedIn.

Here’s why:

YouTube is great for long-form content so whatever is being discussed in the comments is probably something specific and of substance. Also, if you become part of the community that you intend to interact with the comments, you can add to their personalized jokes and memes relating to the original content creator. Every content creator with a loyal base has specific jokes/memes only applicable to their community and it’s a great way to get attention on your comment.

LinkedIn is great because of the business context of the platform. People are already in a forward-thinking mindset; take advantage and talk to people there.

It’s a pretty simple strategy, not very sexy, and no short cuts; but I promise you- it works. The best way to execute this is to start with one content creator. Whether it’s Tony Robbins or the world’s number one beekeeper, find someone that is or can be relevant to you and start taking advantage of the attention they have garnered. The bottom line: be kind and be authentic. Good luck!