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Comment Sniping – Getting the Top Comment on a YouTube Video

April 27, 2012

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video comments

This post is by John Burnside on how to make the most of video commenting.You can read the guidelines for guest posting at our guest posting guidelines page.

I’m sure you will have heard of YouTube by now, it is the third most popular site on the internet (after Google and Facebook) and gets between 3 and 4 billion page views every day.  That is an enormous amount of traffic potential for your blog or website. The obvious way to gain traction on YouTube is with a unique and viral video but with a site with that many views there’s more than one way to get people’s attention.

If you can get YouTube visitors to your YouTube profile page then from there you can direct people to your blog, Facebook page, Twitter account etc. Also because YouTube is owned by Google the backlink love you will get from a strong profile page on YouTube will be well worth the effort.

As bloggers we use words as our weapons and the comments section on YouTube gets a lot of people’s hearts racing just as much as the videos and we can use that to get people’s attention and get our names out there. The key is to aim for the top comment before you even commit a word to the web and give yourself an advantage at getting that elusive top spot so here are a few things that I have learned about what comments gain the most likes.

Keep It Short

One thing that seems very obvious when you start to research the top comments on YouTube is that the vast majority of top comments can fit onto only one line. This could be to the nature of people surfing the internet. Most experienced web users have had years of practice skim reading articles and overlooking adverts and have become very efficient at it. If you can get your message across in one line then it will be read by more people and hopefully catch the eye of your audience.

Know Your Audience and Cater for Them

If you want your comment to be liked by the audience it’s a good idea to know what type of people they are beforehand. The first thing to look at is the video itself and analyze it. What genre does it fall into: music, film, politics, private, viral or any of the other categories? This will give you your first clues.

To take the example of politics, you will have more license to write a long comment (one of the few exceptions to rule one) because people are wanting to find out more about the mood around a particular issue. Also on a political video it tends to help if you have a strong opinion on either side of the argument, if you sit on the fence no one will feel strongly enough about what you are saying to click that coveted like button.

One example I am going to mention is the most popular video on The Guardian (an English newspaper) area of YouTube about police brutality during a protest. The most popular comment on that video is ‘poor policeman hounded for doing his job’. This is a short statement and obviously comes down on one side of the argument. Although I didn’t expect this comment to be top on this video because the guardian has a liberal reader ship this is about popularity, not politics, and gauging the tone of the other comments this commenter has summed up the majority of opinions (there were a lot of banned comments on this video being harsh to the man who was hit) and put it in a clear and non-aggressive way. If you would like to see that video the link is here.

For movie trailers it is a totally different style of comment that consistently takes the top spot. These again are short but importantly take into account the style of the movie. For example, action movie comments have shouting in the majority of the time (conveyed by the use of capital letters). Romantic comedies often have an element of comedy in the comment.  Horror movie trailers also tend to have an element of comedy about them but with a slight sense of the macabre.

The main points here are to first look at the potential audience of the video, then look at the general tone of the comments that have been written previously and go with what’s popular but incorporating your own unique twist on them.

Ask For a Thumbs Up

If you have dabbled in internet marketing at all then you would have probably come across the phrase ‘call to action’ and that’s exactly what you are doing here. Many top comments explicitly ask for a thumbs up if you have performed a certain action for example ‘ thumbs up if ….. sent you here’ or ‘thumbs up if you think …… is awesome’.

This act of giving readers a command makes them more likely on a conscious level to comply. For anyone who is familiar with the famous social psychology experiment performed by Milgram on obedience you will know that humans respond strongly to direct commands.

Show that You Have Watched the Video

There are a few ways to show that you have watched the video in your comment and then give relevant information to anyone reading it. If the comment provides the right kind of either useful or entertaining information then people will thank you by giving you a thumbs up. One way is to put a link within your comment to a particular time in the video with an entertaining moment happening at that time.

If people skip straight to that moment and it gives them a laugh then they will have the comment fresh in their mind and be more likely to interact with that comment. Or to do this in a different way you can comment on a general theme throughout the video that you have picked up on that you think other people watching will have picked up on too. A funny voice that is used or mistakes by the people in the video are often popular themes when it comes to this type of comment.

All it takes to get a top comment on YouTube is a bit of research and a little bit of creativity. Watch the video, read the comments and then apply these techniques to your comment and you will improve your chances of getting it noticed. Once you start putting some thought into it you will have an advantage over people who are commenting merely for fun.

Do you have any comments that have become top on any YouTube videos? Did you find that it brought you extra traffic to your blog?

About the Author:

This post was written by John Burnside, an expert in the making money and Internet marketing niche. To read more of his content or find out about ways to make money online, please visit his blog Money in minutes.

About the author 

Guest Blogger  -  

These posts are submitted by our Guest Bloggers. We accept guest posts on topics that are relevant to our blog like blogging, internet entrepreneurship tutorials, affiliate marketing, social media etc. You can read more about how to submit guest posts by visiting our write-for-us page.

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members. Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

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