A few weeks ago, Chris Brogan announced that he’s turning off blog comments on his site. This comes a few months after Copyblogger did the same thing. And, of course, a few years after Seth Godin, who, as far as I know, never used blog comments.
So what’s the deal?
Are we entering a new era of blogging, where social media becomes the forum and your blog is simply the publishing platform? Is this new trend good for business or bad?
Let’s expore…
On August 6, I saw a Facebook post from Chris Brogan that read:
Today, I turned off the blog comments on my site. We’re all going to live. The conversation happens everywhere now, not just on the blog. It happens here, on Twitter, Google+, in my inbox, etc. Blogs have evolved.
http://chrisbrogan.com/turning-comments-will-okay/
I like that. We are going to live. Things do evolve. Including blogs.
Though she didn’t say it explicitly, Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone hinted at the same thing in her March 24 announcement (brackets are mine):
And here’s the thing: [A blog’s comment section] might not be the right place for [smart additions to the conversation].
If you’re going to put the work in to articulate your thoughts, to make an intelligent argument, and to bring something fresh to the conversation … you should be putting that work into your site, not ours.
She made it sound like a gift, which is kind of funny, because for a lot of businesses, this was a “taking away” of sorts. But that wasn’t the whole gist of her announcement. She was also pointing people to Copyblogger’s Google+ profile, where the conversation tends to be more genuine.
Speaking of genuine, a few weeks after their announcement, on April 11, Sonia gave an update on their decision. This part, in particular, stood out:
I had an amazing number of e-mails from people, many of which really gave me kind of a chuckle and made me smile, from people who said, “You know, I wish you hadn’t turned off comments because I used to get all kinds of traffic to my site from leaving comments on Copyblogger.” And there were some other quite creative and innovative ways people would use Copyblogger comments to get traffic to their sites.
As the moderator of the Crazy Egg blog, I see her point. There are a lot of people out there who think your comment section’s sole purpose is to give them a forum for promoting themselves. They don’t post comments; they post ads. And they clearly aren’t there to add value to the community.
Is it a smart decision to remove comments?
While Copyblogger outgrew comments on their blog, Seth Godin never saw them as a growth tactic.
Just a few years ago, people thought Seth was a maverick. Gurus talked about how weird it was that he was ranking on Google without playing the SEO games.
Now that Google is attacking all so-called SEO strategies (guest posting is already on the chopping block, and I believe low-quality comments will come next), it appears Seth has been ahead of his time.
It also begs the question: Is there any real value to having comments on your blog if you can successfully build a brand without them and if you can outgrow them?
Now that social media has provided a useful place for forums, I have to wonder. Maybe, with these newer channels coming into their own, it’s time to evolve.
There is another side to this debate, though, which was brought to light by my friend, Mary Rose Maguire. Ironically, she posted this in social media:
I decided to do a little digging. I found a blog post from October 23, 2013 (“11 Common Blogging Mistakes That Are Wasting Your Audience’s Time”). It had over 80 comments. Here’s the breakdown of social shares:
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- Twitter: 1.6K
- Google+: 513
- Facebook: 571
- LinkedIn: 459
- Pinterest: 171
Fast forward to today’s post, August 6, 2014, “Entrepreneurs: This 8-Letter Word Will Revolutionize Your Productivity.” (Note: I noticed a date, not a year but at least a date. Not sure when they started this because it’s been months since I checked their blog.) Here’s the breakdown of social shares and the percentage of decreased activity:
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- Twitter: 389 (-75%)
- Google+: 19 (-96%)
- Facebook: 142 (-69%)
- LinkedIn: 90 (-80%)
- Pinterest: 2 (98%)
My math may be wrong but it’s obvious that there has been a very steep decline in social engagement on Copyblogger. I just checked their Google+ account and it’s a ghost town. Some of the blog posts only have a handful of comments. Others have none.
Looking at the numbers, you’d conclude that it isn’t smart to remove comments. But I wonder if social shares is the right metric here.
What we’re looking at is a business decision. From what I observe, Copyblogger’s main income is from product sales and a membership site, where people get to engage through a lot of media, including webinars.
That one-on-one time isn’t registered if you’re just measuring social shares. From my perspective, if people feel satisfied from their engagement and if your profits are high, social shares are just icing.
Blog comments aren’t the end-all in content marketing. If they don’t translate into business profits, they probably don’t matter. Especially when you consider how hard they can be to manage.
As I write that, I’m thinking of the recent run-in I had with a commenter. I removed the self-promoting link but kept the rest of the comment. His snarky response makes me wonder if I should have deleted the whole thing. Trouble is, if I delete every comment that gets self-promotional, I have very few left.
Which brings us back to where we started: Are comments valuable if they are merely an advertising arena? And if they’ve fallen to that level, why wouldn’t we move the conversation to social media?
How do you measure success?
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion either way. It’s a lot of fun to get a conversation started on your blog. But you can waste a lot of time separating the spam from the acceptable comments—time that could be better spent creating more high-quality content.
Seth Godin, Copyblogger and Chris Brogan are leaders in the blogging space. If they’re moving away from comments, I think it’s worth investigating.
Test it on your own blog, and see what works. But whatever else, do invest in conversations—if not on your blog, in social media.
Comments or not, you have to keep your priorities straight: Be present. Be active.
After all, that’s what makes content marketing work—not the technical aspects of it how or where we do it.
