Social Sunday: 5 tips for encouraging commenting
This post kicks off a new, weekly series here at Ecliptic Rift, Social Sunday, in which we’ll look at the best ways to use social media related to EVE Online. Feel free to jump in with your own comments, constructive criticism, suggestions, and questions.
Birds of a feather, and all that.
- Make some decisions about who can comment. You could allow fully anonymous comments, or perhaps require commentators just to specify their name, URL, and maybe an email address. (Get ready for a good bit of moderation to avoid spam and whatnot.) Beyond that, you could require them to have an identity from another site like Google, Twitter, or OpenID. This latter system basically allows users to log into another site, like Wordpress or Yahoo!, and use that ID elsewhere. This way, they can prove their identity without having yet another password to remember.
- Don’t require only one specific sort of ID. This will just discourage comments. Some blogs only allow you to comment with your Google ID, for example, and for those of us whose EVE identity doesn’t reside in the Googleverse, we frequently just won’t comment even if we’d like to do so. You should allow multiple forms of authentication, which with both allow visitors to comment easily as well as reduce spam and sock puppets.
- I seriously recommend using some form of commenting system, like Disqus or IntenseDebate. Both work well, integrate with multiple blog platforms, and only have fairly minor differences between them. Whichever you choose will do the job pretty well. This sort of system will allow your commentators to retain ownership of their words. They can have a record of what they write on different sites and can easily keep up with ongoing conversations, rather than comment and disappear. They can also choose to publicize their comments (e.g. via Twitter), which will encourage more people to come check out the conversation.
A side benefit: since switching to a system, I’ve stopped receiving any comment spam whatsoever. I just don’t see it appear at all. Even if I didn’t get any other benefit, that alone would make the whole thing worthwhile. Allowing comment spam not only discourages readers, it will end up causing your site to get dropped from search engines. And you could end up allowing all sorts of malware, including keyloggers and other account stealing programs, to use your blog to attack fellow players — or yourself.
- Allow users to choose to receive future replies to the same post via email. Even if you don’t use this sort of system, you want to encourage your visitors to come back and continue to participate in the conversation. Otherwise, they’ll come and say something, then someone else will respond and the first commentator will never know. Some people won’t want to use the option, but many will.
- When folks do comment, reply to them. Engage in conversation with them, and sound like yourself. After all, they took the time to come tell you what they think, so be friendly and polite. Personally, I find this one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of blogging.
What other suggestions do you have to encourage commenting?
