What Bloggers Need to Know about Comments
Posted on 17 Feb 2010 under Essays, Random
If there’s one universal truth that all bloggers will accept, it’s this: we’re all comment whores. All bloggers love receiving feedback on their posts, and these come mostly in the form of comments. If you offered a passionate blogger a choice between getting a steady stream of comments on all his blog posts on one hand, and eternal life on the other, he’d probably choose the comments (besides, who wants to live forever anyway?).
What most bloggers seem not to do too well is to reply to the few comments that they do get. I’m going to try to make some points here about the right etiquette for replying to comments on your blog posts or stories.
- Always reply to every comment (or commenter)…individually. You have to realise that getting comments is not your right. It’s nothing short of an honour that someone has taken time out to read your post, and then taken some more time out to type a comment on it. Unless you thank them for their comment or post a reply to their reply, they will be discouraged from writing comments for you in the future.
- Always reply to every comment (or commenter)…individually. It was important enough to repeat as point 2.
- If you do not want your comments thread to go haywire, try to keep spam and off-topic replies to a minimum. Of course, you cannot prevent others from posting off-topic stuff in the comments, but you can actively avoid doing it yourself. That might help.
As a writer, I love getting detailed feedback on my writing, from how the characters of my story were perceived to how the pace of the story was fine (or not fine). I try to do the same thing for others. I have, in the past when time permitted it, spent hours writing a detailed critique for others on Storiesmania. The response I usually got was what made it all worthwhile, and made it worth doing the same thing again. But I’ve also seen that sometimes when I write a good length review, when someone posts nothing but a “thanks!” in return, I never bother spending time writing them a proper comment again.
Maybe I’m just being a little demanding, but put yourself in a commenter’s position. Unless you can make the commenter feel that his comment is valued, you will not be getting any valuable comments.
True to the core! Comments just make the day! Being a comment whore is a part of the job description of being a blogger.
pata nahi log kab samjhenge!
dekhta hun ab tuu kaise reply karta hai comments ke
Dekh, most of the times people don’t comment much because the post is such that there’s not much to comment. Generally, if you write a post that has some kind of controversial theme that invites opinions, you’ll get lots of replies.
I agree. Most people appreciate it if you reply to comments (I know I do). There is the issue of allowing comments to appear immediately or to hold for moderation for unknown people.
What is your opinion on this?
I love Akismet <3
Seriously, though, I trust Akismet completely for a wordpress blog. Generally, for me, it’s not much of an issue to have to wait for the blog owner to moderate my comment before it appears. There are, however, 2 issues with this:
1. If you do not login every so often, you are likely to keep a lot of comments in queue. The disadvantage of this is that if, in the meantime, someone else comes, they will not see the queued comments. The more comments people read, the more opinions they have to comment on.
2. For people new to blogs, the “comment is awaiting moderation” notice could be a bit of a discouragement, particularly if they do not understand that keeping comments waiting for moderation is pretty natural for a lot of blogs.
Just my opinions, though.
Also, it’s nice to see someone from Indiblogger actually come and read my blog!