The internet is full of trolls ready to rip your latest song apart right in front of your eyes. Nothing gives these sick bastards more satisfaction than ruining someone's day. Even if you have a tough hide, hateful comments on the music you’ve worked hard to create always stings a little. I’m going to show you how to make money from your music video haters. What sweeter justice could you ask for?

I don’t write about this very often on the Black Ghost Audio blog, but I release music under the alias Virtus in my spare time. A while back I put about $100 towards marketing a music video of mine on Facebook, and it resulted in 38k views, 675 reactions, 256 comments, and 235 shares. Not bad, right? This type of engagement leads to more people checking out your music, which translates into more streaming royalties, more ticket sales, and more people buying your merch.



1. Upload High-Quality Content



There was some sick, calculated, psychological tomfoolery behind the marketing strategy for this video that worked 100% according to plan. You can quickly achieve results like this yourself, but there’s one primary prerequisite.

The success my music video saw on Facebook wasn’t due to the fact that it was the most fantastic song ever made, but it was definitely of a high-quality, and it was something worth sharing. If you like EDM and Trap you’d probably be into the song, and if comic book style artwork is something you enjoy, you'd probably think the video is pretty cool too. Before you spend a dime on marketing, make sure you have a product worth selling, and a defined audience to pitch it too. Here’s the music video that was promoted:

Once you have a killer music video that you’re ready to upload, you need to do something that’s going to get people fired up enough to comment on it. In my case, I decided that merely captioning the video “The craziest EDM drop ever?” would be sufficient enough. Cocky, ignorant, and targeting people who care about EDM. Perfect. The trap had been set, and all I needed to do was bait the wolves.



2. Tag Your Friends



The next step was to tag a couple of my friends in the post, and politely ask them to tag a couple of their friends. This got the comment section started, and before long, complete strangers were either tagging their friends or leaving their own comments on the track.

Plenty of the feedback I received was positive. Many people checked out the video, gave it a like, and continued on their merry way. I even had a kind soul generously invite me to North Carolina. To this day, I'm still wondering if this person wants to book me to play a show, or just hang out and play Smash Bros. Either way, I'm down.



Now, the shit storm you’ve been waiting for has arrived. I present to you… the haters:



What kind of response would you have if someone left a comment like this on a music video of yours? The typical reaction is to either ignore it, delete it, or cry about it in the corner of your studio. I decided to go against the grain here and have a little bit of fun with my haters (P.S. I’m Canadian):



Once people realized that I was actually responding to comments in a funny, sarcastic, light-hearted manner, they happily jumped in with their own comments; some positive and some negative. Not everyone agreed with my methods, and I even had someone tell me that I was responding to comments in the wrong way:



3. Respond to Every Comment



I responded to every comment, good or bad, no matter what. This paid off in two essential ways. The first was that some people ended up checking out the video and then realized the comment section was blowing up, which they found entertaining in and of itself:



The second way in which responding to comments paid off had to do with a unique Facebook video feature. When you leave a comment on a Facebook video, other people who have commented on the video are also notified. This feature keeps people returning to the video to engage with it repeatedly. If you didn’t know who Virtus was before, you did after you left a comment. This following comment stirred up 18 replies, and countless notifications:



As much as responding to comments is important, you need to go about it in the right way. Calling someone names online makes you seem petty and doesn’t add much value to a conversation. Use your comments as an opportunity to provide entertainment to your fans, but try to do this in a way that doesn’t belittle the person you’re responding to. I’ve included some of my crowning sarcastic achievements below:



4. Retarget People Who Engage with the Video



Facebooks Ads allow you to retarget people who have engaged with your content in the past. This means everyone who commented on my video was going to be getting hit up with more of my content again in the future. With this ability, I would maintain the listeners who enjoyed my music and use my pack of haters to fuel organic engagement on future videos. These haters were unknowingly providing me with free extended marketing; every time someone comments on a Facebook video, there's a chance that the people apart of their social network see that they've engaged with your content.

