Enhancing your Business Blog with Customer Comments: Trends

One of the great business benefits of writing a blog is its ability to establish a repertoire with consumers. While the relationships is typically one sided with most consumers simply reading the content, many will participate in a community dialog by leaving comments. Comments are valuable in such that they garner insight into your customer-base and create a sense of community: many viewers will respond to comments left by others. As a result, people keep coming back to your site to interact with like minded consumers.

Given the value comments can add to a blog-based marketing platform, it is worthwhile to consider why people leave comments and how commenting can be encouraged. While we’ll delve into specific tactics that yield customer comments in a future post, Nick Halstead of fav.or.it aggregated some interesting comment related statistics that speak volumes about commenter behavior.

First, based on data aggregated from about 2000 blogs, Halstead found that, in general, there is significantly less commenting on the weekends. However, because the comment to blog-post ratio remains relatively steady over the course of the week, this dip in total comments is likely due to a decline in the number of blog posts written. Thus, readership and participation by viewers is consistent over the course of a week and a function of content produced by the blog’s author. (In the following histogram, blue bars are total comments produced while green bars are total blog posts produced).

In addition, by evaluating the comment frequency distribution from some of the top ranking technology blogs, it becomes clear that most people only leave a single comment. However, as evidenced from the distribution generated from data captured from TechCruch (among other blogs), there are a subset of power commenters that leave so many comments that they appear to be engaging conversation with other people (note the long tail of the histogram. Here, the y-axis is the total number of comments produced by a user and the x-axis is the user frequency).

As behavior begets behavior, attracting a power commentor can encourage other readers to respond in kind. An interesting point noted by Halstead is that several authors are also the top commenters on their own blogs: not only do they write the post, but they constantly interact with commenters by responding to questions that might have been asked or elaborating on an interesting point a reader may have introduced. So take that next step forward with your blog-based marketing platform and interact with your readers via the comments section. You may just make a few fans and friends along the way.

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