How to Engage Your Blog’s Community (Day 13)

supporters
This is day 13 of the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media. Today, I’m happy to have my good friend, Danny Brown to share his thoughts on community.

_________________

There’s been much written about what makes a good blog community. Some of the smartest and best bloggers around have all shared their views, and they all make great points.

So I’m not going to talk about that today.

Instead, I’d like to offer some ideas on how you can best engage your blog community once you’ve started to grow one. The great news is, with social media it’s never been easier to really connect with your readers and visitors. And since I’m a big believer that even just one single regular reader or subscriber is a community, then even if you’re a new blogger hopefully this will help.

It Doesn’t End with the Comments

One of the most immediate ways for any blogger to engage his or her community is via the comments section. After all, this is where you should be spending the majority of your blogging time (yes, much more than the actual blog writing itself).

Yet so many bloggers invite comments, answer them, then that’s it. This is the equivalent of just having your voicemail on and never taking calls. To really engage, try some of the following:

Valeria Maltoni frequently emails her commenters (manually – no auto-email program) to thank them for their comments. A great personal touch.
Twitter is a great way to continuously engage your blog community. Offer the option for commenters to leave their Twitter ID’s, and thank them via Twitter for their comment (with a link to the comment itself).
If you see a particularly great comment, why not ask the author to guest post and expand on their views? What better way to engage with someone than offering them the chance to engage further with the community itself?

Lead and Be Led

In his book Tribes, Seth Godin suggests that everyone has the capacity to be a leader. The same goes for your blog community – while you’re essentially “the leader” because it’s your community that people are becoming part of, why not offer everyone the chance to be a leader?

  • Always ask what your community would like to read about. This doesn’t mean you have to lose your own voice, but it does mean you can offer one for so many others.
  • Introduce polls to see what your community is thinking. This could be something as simple as a “Did you like this post” thumbs up or down, to a fully-fledged poll on the topic being discussed and what parts connected.
  • Consider adding a forum where your community can engage not only you but your other community members too. This is simple to do as well – just set up a Ning community, for example, and link to it.

These are just some of the immediate ways you can start to engage your blog community. There are many more, and ones that may be better suited to you (Google Friend Connect, for instance, also offers a hugely effective way for your community to engage each other).

The main thing is that you engage and really converse with the community that’s making your blog what it is. Otherwise, you may as well just have a static website.

And where’s the fun in that?

About Danny: Sir Daniel Brown is the Social Media Strategist for Maritz Canada, publishes an Ad Age top-rated blog,  and is founder of 12for12k.

Homework: Pick and idea from this post and try it. Note the results.

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up here.

Posted January 13, 2010
  • I found this to be an inspiring quote:

    “Think of social media as a cocktail party about how to create buzz online. “You don’t go to a cocktail party and scream at the top of your lungs, ‘Buy my product.’ What works is you have some meaningful conversation first. And that’s just how social media works.”
  • Good point.
  • denikasrel
    Danny,
    Most of my reaction has already been stated above, so here's yet another bravo for this post. Great ideas all, and ones that are imminently doable. I too will look to start sending personal emails to those who comment on my blog. It's simple gesture yet can mean a lot -- makes things more personal the way around.

    Perhaps the ease of which we can interact, comment, reply etc, online somehow makes it feel more digital than human. Things can go back and forth so fast and appear as just words on a screen. But of course, we are all humans behind those words (except for the bots).
  • Agree - I touch is where the value is.
  • Agreed Deni. We can become detached, or at least it feels like it, and something as simple as a few words by email can make all the difference.
  • Not only do I frequently email my blog commentators, I'm shortly going to extend that big time as I found a plugin to, well, I don't want to ruin the suspense here. Suffice to say, emailing is something every blogger and reader does, so use email.
  • Dude - share the wealth! :-D
  • John there is a plugin which will send out emails to commenters. However, I have not found one that does not appear to be what it is. A tool that sends out an email to commenters.

    For such a practice to work, it has to be personal in my opinion. Don't think you can fool your readers. They will know it is a canned response to their comment.
  • I've seen a plug-in that shows the email of all your commenters, and you can choose to email many or just one. It does give a more "personal touch" than the usual automated ones, although it is (at its essence) still automated. Just less so.

    (I'll shut up now as I'm waffling!).
  • Info on the Contact Commenters plugin is here http://ariwriter.com/commenter-or-lurker-which-... [thanks, Ari!]
  • It would be great to have a plugin that emailed me when someone has commented a certain number of times. Then I could send a personal email to that person.
  • There is such a plugin, which I am currently testing. It does that and more. Moments ago, for instance, I just used it to email a generic message (albeit with individual mail merge salutations) to 800+ commentators who have not commented in 180 days.
  • Wow - Let me know when you post about it...
  • Tell the Genius Alien. He may have some ideas on that one.
  • These are wonderful tips. I never thought of emailing and personally thanking folks for their comments. Great idea. Also love asking community what they want. Assuming I have a community. :) I'm behind on my 30-days of lessons, but you've got me blogging more often. Can't wait to get my wordpress site up so I can add things like a poll.
    What would you add to this? http://bit.ly/8gKJrt
  • Great collection of short, impacting suggestions Kat (and I love how fluid it is with the "just added" updates).

    As for the community, it can be built around the blog as well. The blog is the homebase, but you can always go out with friends - tweets, shares, emails, convos, they're all part of your community. And I know I've seen yours grow, so you're good to go :)
  • Great post, Kat. Commented!
  • Great post Danny, with some great ideas about 'becoming the change' for when creating 'new' communities.
    I guess writing the post is only one step along the road to creating a new blogging community.
    Regards
    Paul
  • Hey there Paul,

    Single steps are fine, but it's when you collate them that they become a path to somewhere. The great thing about paths is that they can be journeyed with friends, which is what communities are all about (or should be).

    Cheers! :)
  • My favorite tip here is the personal email to commenters. What I would call a "high value" task.
  • @DannyBrown - Let's give an "A" to @TanveerNaseer who just sent me an email of thanks for a comment on his blog!
  • LOL! And I hadn't even had a chance to read this post yet. Some great tips here, Danny. Ironically, it was Valeria who showed me the wisdom in following up with people who leave a comment. Of course, I think it's key to demonstrate the value you feel the commenter gave to your blog, of what made you appreciate their contribution.

    As bloggers we have to remember people are reading a lot of different sites, with different content and it does take time to respond to each one. So when someone does, we really should treat like gold because the person's not only sharing their ideas, their sharing a more valuable resource with us - their time.

    Thanks again for the "A", John. Going to wear that badge with pride. :)
  • "Treat like gold" - perfect analogy, Tanveer. Gold glistens, and engaging your community helps them shine as well. It's all perpetual motion and rewards.
  • Thanks Danny. I appreciate that. And thanks for putting together this great post - some very good points here that all bloggers can start implementing today. :)
  • It's well deserved. Frank get's an "A" too - but only for attendance. ;-)
  • So true Tanveer. In the day and age in which we live where we are bombarded with requests for our time - the act of "spending" time with us on our blogs should be highly rewarded.

    An email of thanks, an engagement with the reader through commenting back, even a plugin that features recent comments are all ways of saying "thank you for spending your time here."

    Congrats on the A - bring the teacher an apple tomorrow. ;)
  • You know, it's funny, in my latest blog piece, I wrote about how companies in approaching social media need to move past focusing on how many followers/friends they accumulate and instead focus on engaging the person. In many ways, this same philosophy should be applied to bloggers - instead of focusing on how many comments, tweets, or traffic you get, look instead at the level of engagement you're creating with your readers.

    Sad irony how there's so much written out there about how to increase your numbers, but not as much on how you can increase your engagement. Thankfully, John and Danny's work here is helping to compensate for that.

    Good idea, about the apple, Frank. Of course, I'll have to find out if I should get a Red Delicious or a Granny Smith one. :)
  • MacIntosh, please...
  • Excellent piece Danny. I'm sitting here looking at my goals for 2010 in regards to blogging. In my book, evaluation is a key to understanding how we are doing with our community. I'm wondering how much, and how, you measure your "return on engagement" (to steal a great phrase from Grant Griffiths)?
  • I guess it depends on how you want to measure it, Frank. Has your visits increased due to your engagement? Have your subscribers increased? Have social shares increased? Do folks leave more comments? Are you asked to guest post elsewhere?

    These are just some of the metrics you can use. Then, of course, there are the others - advertisers contacting you, blogger outreach programs, increase in Google Page Rank or Alexa rating.

    Define how you wish to measure, then use that yardstick on a monthly, quarterly, bi-annual and yearly basis.
  • Great post Danny. The key to engaging your blog community is you have to be the one to be engaging. The blogger has to be the one to start the conversation and to make sure it continues on. We start it with our blog post and we continue to by doing all those things you mention.

    The worse thing a blogger can do is to have a one way conversation and just expect their readers to carry it on. If you want your blog to be successful, you have to be a proactive blogger and engage your readers everywhere.
  • Hey there Grant, cheers.

    It seems like common sense, doesn't it? Engage to create engagement? It doesn't necessarily need to be in your comments section, but continue the conversation somewhere. Or else you may as well just wear a constant megaphone... ;-)
blog comments powered by Disqus