Blogs are instrumental tools for increasing the amount of traffic on your website, and as a result a growing number of companies are implementing blogs onto their websites. Blogs also provide a great medium for customers to interact with your company, mostly through comments. Now more and more blogs are implementing third party commenting systems to make the most out of customer interactions. Third party commenting systems have advantages over standard commenting systems including increased visibility on social media, their ability to engage audiences, and preventing spam on your blog. But beware - not all that glitters is gold.
Social Media
With Twitter and Facebook, people now have the ability to blast their opinion about anything and everything to hundreds of people within seconds. Although sometimes we would rather not hear about someone’s #selfie, social media can play a big role in your blog’s publicity. Even though not everyone agrees with what you have to say on your blog, in most cases no publicity is bad publicity. (But if you disagree feel free to write it in a comment below!)
The backlinks both Twitter and Facebook provide help direct people to your website and increase the number of views you have. With websites such as LinkedIn and especially Google+, those backlinks also help your website’s authenticity. With more authenticity, your SEO ranking will flourish as well.
Engaging Audiences
You can boost interaction on your blog, even without linking to social media sites. Third party commenting systems have options to follow a certain comment, subscribe to users who comment, and even reply directly to a commenter. This helps to create a community of commenters. The more users feel connected with your blog, the more likely they will come back and read more.
Spam Control
While some third party commenting systems allow you to post anonymously, most require you to fill out a profile. This ensures authenticity, helps foster a community, and, most importantly, helps cut down on spammers.
Many third party commenting systems also allow you to preview a user’s comment before it goes live on your blog. This helps decrease spam comments as well. Just as you use comments for backlinks to your website, so do the spammers, so it is helpful to stay one step ahead of them.
Not Everything That Glitters is Gold
Third party commenting systems definitely have more pros than cons, however they are not perfect. They often have longer loading times, which can be frustrating for some users. Also, not everyone user will want to log-in in order to comment on your blog, which also can frustrate users. Lastly, when electing to use a third party commenting system, you lose some of the design control that you have with the default commenting system.
Conclusion
Now you know a little more about third party commenting systems and whether or not you want one on your blog. If you want to investigate the right one for your website, we have some resources below. Have any other comments? Leave one below!
