Today is a guest post from Emma Cossey. Emma is a lifestyle blogger and social media journalist. She can often be found , or writing about social media, web resources and freelancing on her own blog.
Is commenting giving way to sharing?
I read a guest post recently on Daily Blog Tips where the writer encouraged readers to comment more and ‘rebuild the community’. While the post was a little aggressive, it did highlight an interesting trend that many other blogging friends of mine are noticing too – a decrease in blog comments.
The guest poster, Harrison Li, argued that readers should make the effort to comment, as a way to show their appreciation for the free content. After looking at posts from a couple of years ago, and posts now, he noticed the number of comments decreasing. He commented:
“There’s only one simple reason to all this, the result of bloggers being lazy and wanting only benefits from the sites they visit. We read, absorb new knowledge, and leave.”
Writing off a lack of comments as laziness on the part of readers is naïve to say the least. While there has been a decrease in comments, Harrison has missed a big factor: Social Media. Readers may not comment as much, but they’re sharing links and contents much more.
Socially sharing
It’s a multi-purpose action. Readers get to share content with their networks, while adding their own comments. For those lacking in time, and catching up on a long list of (ever-expanding) blogs, this is the perfect solution. And for the blogger, it means more people see the content. With an ever-growing blogging community, getting the word out on social networks can help small bloggers compete with much large blogs.
So the community hasn’t died, it’s just moved and evolved. Social media can give a blog a larger community than commenting alone, even if it does mean the community itself is diluted.
The diluted community
The problem faced by bloggers, and readers too, is the discussion can occur over multiple sites, making it difficult to keep track of it. This is what I mean by a diluted community. The Disqus commenting plugin can help keep some of the discussion on the blog, by importing social discussions into the post. Google+ is also a useful place to share content, thanks to the ability to leave long comments.
Social media does make it harder to control the conversation. A blogger can choose what comments are shown on their blog post, but they have little control over what people say on someone’s personal social media account.
Putting social media aside for the moment, there are other factors that stops people commenting. Adding a comment to certain blogs can involve jumping through many hoops. By the time you’ve worked out what the CAPTCHA words are, remembered what your sign in details are, and clicked on the confirmation link in your email, you’ve pretty much lost the will to live.
On a personal level, I’m unlikely to comment on a post if it echoes what another reader has already said. From a blogging point of view too, I’d certainly prefer people to retweet or like my content, rather than see five comments saying “I agree”.
Tempero on Google+
All makes a huge amount of sense, Emma. It’s a shame though, I think – sharing links just isn’t the same as commenting in situ (not least because the average RT might only leave room for about 10 characters of insightful analysis!) Plus, when a conversation gets broken up into countless twitter lines, it’s not really a conversation anymore.
All that said, I think the onus then falls on any writer who’s *seeking* comment to tilt their copy in that direction. If it’s engaging and open-ended with a clear call to action and questions, then I’d like to think commenting will still happen. If it’s less engaging but perhaps more informative, then it’s probably absolutely fine if people simply forward links.
Good point Robin, I’m seeing a lot of bloggers post follow up articles to posts which created a lot of discussion. Ultimately you’re right though, some articles are just more slanted towards being shared.
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I don’t comment as much as I used as I do not have the time but then I don’t read as many blogs as I used to. I have noticed a decrease in comments on my blog but the readership is up so that makes me happy. I think with my blog a lot of people read it and then move on. Not sure whether that is good or bad but I will take it.
I guess that leads on to a whole other issue too – how do we measure success in blogging!
This definitely deserves a little comment ;)
This definitely deserves a little comment ;)
Well I really don’t think they are gone at all :D