The Social Enthusiast

There’s nothing more disappointing than pouring your heart into a blog post, anxiously awaiting the response from your audience… and getting no response in the comments.

As disappointing as that can be, bear in mind the 90-9-1 rule of social media:

• 90% of people in social media will be consumers-only (meaning they’ll never post or comment)
• 9% will comment on others’ content
• 1% will produce original content (and that would be you, my friend.)

So if your readership is in the hundreds or lower, it’s not unusual to have posts that go un-commented.  Still, there are things you can do to encourage your readers to respond.

First and foremost, ask.  It sounds simple, but often just making a clear request for people to comment in your posts will make it clear that you welcome and appreciate it.

Second, don’t always complete your thoughts.  It’s a hard habit to break for an English major, but sometimes it’s better to not finish the story–leaving things open-ended and asking some leading questions can be a way to motivate readers to comment and fill in the blanks.

Last, give them an incentive to comment.  Run a contest where the entry is a adding a comment to the post that announces the contest.  If you’re on WordPress, add plug-ins that reward comments, like CommentLuv (which posts a link to the commentor’s most recent post) or a do-follow plugin that provides links with greater SEO value to commentors’ blogs.

If you try all these tactics and you still aren’t getting any comment love, you might consider doing a poll through PollDaddy (or a similar service) to find out why.  Sometimes readers who won’t comment on a post will anonymously click an answer in a poll.

As a final note, this wouldn’t be much of a post if I didn’t take my own advice.  Got any other suggestions for increasing blog comments?  Share your wisdom by dropping one.