Josh Robertson | Storyteller

It’s nice to build up readers, subscribers and followers. But those are numbers. Treat your audience as a collection of people with worthwhile opinions and you’ll build loyalty. On the Heavy Metal feed, we regularly solicit opinions on comics and movies, and the followers come back to us with astute commentary and discussion. This post sparked reviews and conversation for days.

Community means looking out for your own. On the Heavy Metal Instagram feed, we salute the achievements of contributors regardless of whether the work was done for our publication or someone else.

The illustrations for “Legendes Bretonnes” may be nearly a century old, but when they bubbled up on an art blog I knew they’d appeal to the Heavy Metal readership. They know their art history, and are eager to learn — I’ve also put up posts about Surrealists, N.C. Wyeth, and Goya that met with enthusiasm.

Nothing wins your audience over like a shared sense of humor. I knew that the Heavy Metal audience would enjoy a cat picture — but not just any cat picture.

It’s my strongly-held conviction that the best social media is more than a jumble of shiny objects. Superior feeds have an editorial sensibility and the personality of a blog. This informative gallery of 10 Will Eisner splash pages could just as well have been a blog post on the Heavy Metal website.

You have to feed the social-media beast daily — it helps to know your important dates.

I found Konstantin Komardin during a deep dive into DeviantArt, and I’ve posted his work more than once. He only publishes comics in Russian, but Heavy Metal readers are hoping he’ll come to America.

Heavy Metal magazine is an institution with devoted fans — fans who’ll tell you the magazine has been an influence since they were old enough to buy it, and that they prize their stacks of back issues. When I find an artist who displays that kind of love, enthusiasm or even reverence for Heavy Metal’s significance, it’s always a hit. Jan Buragay, an obscure Philippines-based artist, evokes core Heavy Metal artists Moebius, Caza and Druillet, and our followers cheered him for it.

Hashtags are the way users surf social media and discover new accounts to follow. Brands, and even publishers, tend not to get this, seeing the hashtag as a branding tool. The hashtag is a way of exploring — if you liked this post on this subject, click #subject to find more. I’ve had success tagging strong content as #moebiusmonday, #frazettafriday #breakfastwithbiz and #splashwednesday

Here’s some insight into the community I’ve built from the Impressions and Comments stats in the dashboard of the Instagram app. The all-important engagement rate for the account is over 5%, more than double the 2.18% benchmark for accounts of 100,000+ set by Quintly.