I don’t care about blog comments – you shouldn’t either
[image error]
Happy Sunday all!
It’s a bright sunny day in my neck of the woods – but given our summer of fires, maybe some of you in the southern states can send us some of your rain, and we’ll send you some of our sun – win/win.
Today’s topic comes from a number of authors’ questions. This topic has come up in various forms recently.
As “click-baity” as today’s title is, I truly believe that comments are not important. Let me explain.
[image error]
Comments are the basis of a little conversation between you and your readers or between various readers of your blog. Most blogging platforms have some sort of commenting system and many early bloggers felt that the conversations that occurred because of their posts was one of the most significant parts of blogging.
I know that chatting with readers from other parts of the world about the books that I read were, and still are, one of the wonderful parts of my book blog.
To a large degree commenting has gone the way of the dodo bird. Are there blogs that still have chatty audiences – YES! They are few and far between, though.
Many of the blogs that get a lot of comments have always gotten a lot of comments and this particular audience continues to be chattty. As an example, I’ve been following Anne R. Allen’s blog for many years. Her blog has always had a chatty audience. It is directed at writers and is filled with great information and lively discussion.
I hear a lot of complaints from authors about the lack of comments on their sites – usually these complaints are tied into assumptions that no one reads their blog posts. The number of comments has no correlation with the number of visitors.
In fact, many experts will suggest that only 1% of visitors will leave a comment.
Although a comment might make your day, what you should be focusing on is engagement. Yes, comments are a form of engagement, but we want to focus on engagement on a larger scale.
We want to focus on Social Shares.
“Always controversial, the number of social shares a page accumulates tends to show a positive correlation with rankings. Although there is strong reason to believe Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm, there are many secondary SEO benefits to be gained through successful social sharing.” ~Moz Blog
As indicated in the quote above, for quite some time, the prevailing wisdom was that Google uses social shares in determining the rank of a blog post. This post with quotes from Matt Coutts from Google lets us know that Google used to do this, but were blocked by the various social media. Rather than putting more engineering hours into something and having it blocked, Google moved in another direction to determine the hallmarks of authoritative content.
Let’s move to talk more about Social Engagement. What is it?
[image error]
As you can see above, Social Engagement is equal to the number of people who engaged with your post out of the total number of people who saw your post. So if very few are going to engage with your blog post in terms of comments, what should we be encouraging?
Remember above I said that comments are a type of engagement – and they are – and we don’t care about them.
Why?
A comment is one action – between the commenter and the owner of the blog (and yes perhaps read by other visitors to the blog). That’s pretty limiting.
Compare that to me visiting a blog post and rather than leaving a comment, I decide to share it with my followers on Twitter by clicking on the little Twitter share button. I have almost 17,000 followers on Twitter. Once a link to that blog post has been shared on my Twitter stream, it is pretty likely that some of my followers will catch sight of it, and click on the link to go read it. Once some of those folks share it with their followers, the same will happen again.
So a comment is one action that generally goes no further. A share is an action that could potentially have hundreds of further actions.
If Google cares about engagement – or social engagement – you will be much further ahead to stop asking for comments and encourage your readers to share your posts on their various social media platforms with their friends and followers.
Does this make sense?
This week’s action items:
make sure you have share buttons on your blog posts
encourage your readers to share your posts
focus on engagement methods for your blog that don’t include comments
*****
Along this vein, please be sure to share this blog post using the share buttons below. If you want to ensure you are notified of every post, subscribe to the blog – join 18,000+ other interested folk. You can unsubscribe at any point if you don’t find the blog posts helpful. Lastly, if you are struggling with technical tasks with respect to being an author, let me help. Subscribe to my mailing list and I’ll send you 2 books and several videos that cover key pain points.
The post I don’t care about blog comments – you shouldn’t either appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
