How Important Are Comments on Your Blog?

Last Updated on October 18, 2016

During this week’s Blogchat, a weekly chat held every Sunday night on Twitter, the topic was comments: how to get more of them to your blog and the importance of leaving them elsewhere.

Most bloggers seem to be nothing short of obsessive when it comes to comments. We want more of them, we want quality comments. We want real dialog.

There’s a long-held belief that the number one way to get more comments on your blog is to leave more comments on other people’s. The idea, apparently, is that if you leave a comment on someone else’s blog, they’ll somehow be shamed into reciprocating.

It’s a nice idea, but it’s not really a practical one.

All blogs are different, after all, and some folks who leave a comment on your blog might themselves have a blog that focuses on a subject that doesn’t interest you. And just because you leave a comment on someone else’s blog doesn’t mean that person will automatically return the favor.

It just doesn’t always happen.

But towards the end of the discussion, I asked a very simple question: On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most important measure of a blog’s success, how important are comments for your blog?

There weren’t a great deal of responses, because Blogchat moves pretty quickly. But of the handful I did receive, there was only a three-point range and the average worked out to be 4.25.

A four. On a scale of one to 10.

Granted, that’s from a small number of people, but they were fairly consistent in their rankings: the lowest vote was 3 and the highest was 6. No one put comments higher than that, which means that either they don’t see comments as a valuable measure or they don’t really care so much whether people comment.

Yet when comments are a topic of Blogchat, nearly everyone seems to be ready to chime in with their own advice about how get more of them on your blog.

There’s a disconnect here somewhere.

Even so, people seem to be leaving less comments these days. Since I installed Livefyre for this blog’s commenting system, I’ve noticed a modest increase in comments. That goes against common sense, because when Livefyre made its debut here, users had to register a Livefyre account to be able to leave a comment; that should have caused fewer comments, not more. (Since then, Livefyre has added the option to comment with just a username and email address.)

But there are many of you who read this blog’s content in daily email updates or (less often) through RSS readers. (RSS readers, I’m told, are so 2005.)

The point is, not all of the people who read what I write are actually on my site when they’re reading it. That means they’re probably less likely to leave a comment, because doing so means actually coming here to do so. But if we bloggers don’t provide that RSS option, or worse, we provide only excerpts that are designed to make people click through from the email to come to the blog to read the full article, they are less likely to read at all.

It’s almost as though we’re setting ourselves up to fail if comments are our only measure of success.

There are those who take under-emphasis of comments to the extreme, too. One guy tweeted that he was going to shut down comments completely in favor of social sharing. I can understand the notion that sharing a post on Facebook or Twitter can get more eyes on a blog, but not everyone who might have something to say in a comment is going to share, especially if they feel that their input on the subject isn’t welcome to begin with.

I’m not sure why you’d want to have only one or the other. Why not allow comments and give the option for social sharing. That way, readers can feel like they’re part of the discussion they want their friends or followers to check out, too.

If you think comments are important to begin with. Do you?

Your Turn:
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the “most important” measure of your blogging success, where do comments rank with you?