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It's one thing to build a community and another to build an engaged community. Blog comments do this very well.

Building Community Through Comments

It’s one thing to build a community and another to build an engaged community. Blog comments do this very well. So why don’t we take advantage of it?

We want our customers to engage with our brand. Ideally, our customers would be sharing our articles on Facebook and Twitter. Of course, we want our audience to like our stories on Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram. If we build a community, our brand will prosper, right?

However, one of the oldest forms of online community-building is being ignored by more and more companies.

Increasingly, bloggers with a large audience are turning off comments on their blog articles. I think that’s a grievous mistake – one that shuts the door on an opportunity to build real community.

Remember When Blogs Were Important?

Long before social media existed, blogs, RSS feeds, and comment sections were the places where you would build a following and a community.

Most of the well-known marketing brands of today were built using their comment sections to have a conversation with the author. That type of access seems increasingly rare.

What changed in the last 5 to 10 years?

Why are so many prolific bloggers no longer enabling comments on their new blog posts? Read more

Blog comments go in and out of fashion and in many respects, it's considered only important for bloggers. However, it's just as important for small business websites who publish.

Blog Comments for Small Biz – Not Just for Bloggers

Blog comments go in and out of fashion and in many respects, it’s considered only important for bloggers. However, it’s just as important for small business websites who publish. That’s you, right?

Postmatic – We’re about conversations reimagined.

By now you know we’re all about blog comments and make them a true part of the blogging/content experience as opposed to just an afterthought. This isn’t just for bloggers or affiliate marketers. It’s also a great business tool.

From our flagship plugin Postmatic, through to Epoch and Elevated Comments, as well as Crowd Control and Postmatic Social Commenting (and now a little thing we like to call Replyable), our goal has always been simple: reinvent engagement and make commenting fun again, for content creator and commenter alike.

We’d like to think we’re well on our way to doing that if the feedback and praise from our users are anything to go by.

But as much as we’re happy to see how well our reinvention of commenting has been received, there’s much more to Postmatic than “simple blog comments.”

What’s our Why?

It’s a little-known story that Postmatic came about in the same way most services and plugins do — there was a problem that needed a solution. Postmatic is that solution.

Back in 2013 we were working with Global Citizen Year – a program for high school grads to spend a year overseas doing aid work before college. The destinations were remote and internet connectivity scarce.

As a way to share how the students were doing, and the work they were carrying out, each student was required to blog at least weekly about the experiences they were having.

The problem was, not all the parents (or grandparents) back home understood how RSS worked. There was no easy way to receive much anticipated updates.

We came up with a solution by asking – what if email could be used to not only publish posts and send the updates but allow parents, grandparents, and students alike to comment back and forth on the post via email?

After all, pretty much everyone with even rudimentary connectivity knows how to work email – it’s why it’s seen so many attempts to pronounce it dead year after year.

So we came up with some ideas, put together a proof of concept, and set it to work. Soon, posts and comments were flying around left, right and center. Not only did this let the students share their endeavors with the world, it gave the parents and other family members back home peace of mind, as their child was now only an email away.

From that small moment of need and experimentation, the idea of Postmatic as a wider service was born.

Your customers want to participate, too.

Small business owners have websites and often make the mistake of creating brochure sites they never change. For findability (SEO), you need to publish regularly. This is done on the blog.

Engaging with your customers, updating them on your new offerings, and answering their questions and concerns is an important part of any small business marketing. Sure, you can post to Facebook. But what if it shuts down? Though unlikely, the more likely move is that your customers tire of Facebook’s ongoing privacy issues.

Owning your content and articles on your WordPress site and engaging with your customers in a way that is easy for them (email) and you is a win-win.

Create Your Own Community

One of the reasons Facebook continues to remain valuable, is because of their universal user experience and through the way it encourages private groups. Private or closed groups allow communities to thrive and gives a small business even more opportunities for engagement.

Whether users need a safe space to talk about private or sensitive matters or they want a haven from political posts, Facebook groups are essentially micro-networks within the bigger social network.

The problem is, users are signing away so many layers of privacy and data collection just by having a Facebook account. And let’s not be naive in thinking their algorithms aren’t continuing to build your personal graph in the confines of a private group.

This is where Postmatic comes into play.

By using the password-protected feature of the Private setting for a WordPress post, you can publish content that only those you invite will be able to see.

Now, instead of the post being public – and, by association, all the comments being public, too – the content is only visible to your invited guests. This goes for the comments too.

It’s a simple yet hugely effective way of creating your own mini-network of like-minded people around pretty much anything you wish to share:

  • Early, exclusive access for beta users of a new web product, where the comments are the ongoing feedback hub
  • An exclusive video performance of your indie band’s latest song, with comments being used to pick a CD cover, and plan special intimate gigs in the hometown of these “super fans”
  • A political discussion board where commenters adhere to a strict policy of open but fair dialogue
  • A draft post of a sensitive topic, where invited commenters can discuss where the topic may be encouraging the very thing it’s trying to counter.

These are just some ideas on how you can create a mini-network of commenters, creators, and everyone in-between, and truly foster open dialogue in an environment and communication method that everyone knows well.

All without the privacy concerns of Facebook groups.

Comments are just the beginning

As you can see, these are just two simple examples of where we go a little bit beyond simple comments on a blog, and actually create experiences around a multitude of uses.

But we’re not stopping there.

We’re always looking at ways to continue to push the boundaries of what we think blogs, comments, and engagement looks like, especially in political and societal climates where free and open speech is challenged.

We’ve been noodling away on an idea around this for a while, and we’re almost ready to share.

For anyone that believes like we do that comments are just the start of a two-way discussion and more, we think you’ll particularly like this “new use.”

But that’s for the future.

For now, we’re here simply to make your website and its blog the true engagement platform it deserves to be. If you haven’t taken a look at how we do that yet, maybe now’s the time.

Let’s get the conversation going.

Major contribution of this piece by Danny Brown. Many thanks.

The threat to blog comments isn't social media, it's apathy toward your audience. Caring about your commenters through engaging in conversation is the way to build affinity and loyalty.

If You Want Better Comments, You Have to Care About Your Commenters

The threat to blog comments isn’t social media, it’s apathy toward your audience. Caring about your commenters through engaging in conversation is the way to build affinity and loyalty.

A little while back, I wrote a post over on my own blog about how it wasn’t social media that would “kill blog comments,” but uncaring bloggers.

It was in response to a lot of bloggers complaining about their reduced comment counts and how they were primarily blaming social media for the lack of engagement on their own blogs.

Blogger Apathy Kills Comments

My primary takeaway was this — it’s a lack of empathy.

It’s not as clear-cut as “all the conversations are happening on social media.” They may well be happening a lot – but guess where that traffic will come to when users want to see the source of that discussion?

Once that traffic arrives, if they find a comments area that looks as fun and inviting as a McDonald’s restaurant does to a food snob, of course they’ll leave immediately.

If, on the other hand, they see a blog that opens up to others, and – imagine this! – actively converses with them, they’ll stay. Comment. Reply. Subscribe.

Social media won’t “kill” blog comments – bloggers will.

The post sparked a very thoughtful conversation around the topic of comments and bloggers in general. The key consensus was bloggers who either close down comments or, worse, ignore their commenters are the ones that will lose out more in the long run.

So it’s a little disappointing to see, a full year after that post, so many bloggers who still don’t seem to value their commenters.

Unmoderated Spam Is a Liability

I was doing some research for a future post on the state of commenting today and a bunch of results popped up about comments and their place in today’s content ecosystem.

(For the record, my own take for the last year or so is that perhaps “blog comments” as a description for conversation is the issue, but more on that in a future post).

One of the results that popped up was this post by Jeff Goins, entitled Seven Types of Blog Comments and How to Respond to Them.

It’s a guest post by blogger Jeremy Myers that shares the most common types of blog comments, and how to respond to them (or if you even should).

As of writing this, the post has received 337 comments and counting. Pretty impressive, huh? Until you start going through the comments themselves…

As you can see, this comments section is a spammers paradise.

Your blog is your responsibility.

While there are some genuine comments about implementing the advice in the post, most are back-links to the commenter’s own site.

Some are questionable – the Facebook video downloader app, for example, and the link to an escort site – while others could land Jeff in major trouble (the one about a realtor from RE/MAX being accused of being a pedophile).

Why would Jeff get in trouble? Blog comments are the ownership of the blogger and it’s up to you (the blogger) to make sure there’s nothing illegal or libelous within them.

Did you know that you're legally liable for comments left on your blog? Click To Tweet

In fairness, this particular post was published back in 2011, so perhaps Jeff simply doesn’t monitor it anymore. That being said, a libel suit wouldn’t really care when the post was published, if false statements are left unchecked in the comment section.

Continue the Way You Started

One of the more common “problems,” for want of a better word, is that a lot of bloggers start out with good intentions when it comes to commenting and then let that drop off as they focus on other things.

When they first started blogging, for example, they would respond to all relevant comments (ones that go beyond a standard “nice post!” variation).

Then, they either feel less need to reply and leave the commenters to talk to each other. Or they simply give up replying full-stop and request commenters to find them on social to discuss the post.

While there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with either approach, for the most part, both lead to a sense of disappointment for the commenters.

Blog Hospitality — Engage Your Commenters

Most commenters leave a comment because the post moved them to reply. Can we just stop there?

As a writer, moving your audience to respond is the brass ring. Honor that.

Commenters share their thoughts with the blogger expect feedback directly from the blogger. It’s a matter of hospitality.

When that doesn’t happen, it makes it less compelling to leave a comment. It’s true, some of the best exchanges can come from the community taking the topic in a new direction.

The latter example, though, often invokes a strong reaction. In the comments of one of my recent posts, a long-time commenter on my blog shared her thoughts on “taking the conversation to social media.”

If you invite me to your house and I get all dressed up, fill the tank with gas and head out, only to get there and see a note on your door saying, “I’ve decided to go over to XYZ’s house, you know where she lives, follow me there.” I would politely scribble “screw you” on the note and leave.

It is so arrogant for bloggers to believe their subscribers will follow them where ever they go.Click To Tweet

It is so arrogant for bloggers to believe their subscribers will follow them where ever they go. If I’m subscribed to your blog, why do I need to follow you somewhere else? It’s ridiculous.

Not a lot more I can add to that! But she makes a great point – you’re forcing your commenters through extra hoops just to engage with you.

And what if they moved away from social media channels because of abuse they were getting there or some other reason? Not everyone wants to put up with the noise of social media just to be able to converse with their favorite blogger.

Your blog is your property, where you can control the environment for your visitors. Why force people away from that safety net?

You Have to Care. Really Care

Blogging has come a long way since the 1990’s and as blogging has evolved, so has commenting.

From non-threaded design that took a masters degree to follow to the various commenting options we have today, there is something for every kind of blogger (and commenter).

But to make commenting work, you need to work on it yourself.

  • Don’t take the easy route and force commenters to be elsewhere.
  • Own the conversation and take ownership on making comments a welcoming place.
  • Clean your comment area instead of leaving open to spam, crud, and potential legal issues.
  • Most of all, respond. Commenters have chosen your part of the web over millions of others – respect that accordingly.

And if you really feel taking care of comments is too much hard work, you should talk to us. We have resources and plugins to help and are always here to do so.