The Early Commenter

Gary Vaynerchuk ran Wine Library, his family's liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey, and in 2006 launched Wine Library TV, a video wine blog. He also went where the conversations already were. He told NPR he would search Twitter for a word such as "merlot" and start a conversation with a question like "What kind of merlots do you like?", offering help, such as pairing a wine, rather than a sales pitch. NPR put Wine Library's sales at $60 million of wine a year (NPR, 25 April 2011). By Vaynerchuk's own account most of that growth came earlier: he has said he took the business from about $3 million to $60 million between 1998 and 2003, through email marketing, e-commerce, Google AdWords and blogger outreach (Tech in Asia via The Express Tribune, 17 January 2017).

That was before Twitter or his video show existed, so the Twitter habit shows the method rather than explaining the sales. Platforms have said openly that they value this kind of conversation. In the ranking weights Twitter published in 2023, the chance that a reader would reply and the author would then engage with that reply carried a weight of 75, against 0.5 for a like, though Twitter said the weights were originally set so that each signal contributed roughly equally on average (Twitter, 5 April 2023). LinkedIn said comments were up 37% year on year (LinkedIn, 29 January 2025).