The Changing Face of Reader Engagement–I Want to Hear from You

To really understand this post you need to understand a few things about me:

• I pour over my webstats to learn more about who my readers are, what they read, and how they find me.
• I love discussing the things I write about. That’s why I’ve written about them in the first place.
• After blogging for about six years now, I’ve watched social media grow and evolve a lot, especially in how readers interact with writers.

Since I pour over my stats on a near-daily basis, especially when I see a traffic spike, I have a good idea of how people wind up on my blog. More than half the time it’s from search and lately a good chunk of that traffic (about 15% of visits) is for my My 45 must have WordPress plugins post. This is awesome, since while my yam fries recipe is great, it isn’t what my blog is about in the greater scheme of things. The rest of folks come through links of some sort, most of those via Twitter. Nothing to complain about there. I think it’s great that people come to read what I’ve written.

Okay, a few more people clicking on ads would be great, but, I can’t have everything.

I’ve noticed something really interesting. It hit me over the weekend and all came together in the last day or so—there aren’t as many links from other bloggers anymore. I do get a few via Zemata—makes me wonder if I added the plugin would it add links for me even if I post remotely—but that’s about it. A link here and there.

Then there are comments.

I like comments because I get to continue and extend the conversation. Oh sure I know comments are a hit and miss thing. I tell new bloggers that sometimes you get tons of comments on posts that you’d never figure and ones that you’d think would ignite a firestorm, nothing. So I’m not going to be whining that no one leaves me any comments, that isn’t the point.

What I’ve noticed, is that “discussion” is measured in a currency of tweets and retweets, not links or comments. A quick (very quick, so not terribly scientific) scan of FriendFeed makes me think that’s becoming a ghost-town as well. Not long ago many bloggers, myself included, were talking about how we couldn’t keep up with the fragmented commentary that was going on around the web. Now I wonder if we’re having any commentary at all.

Sure the RT economy is great. I retweet posts I like all the time, just like I share them through Fever as well, and that is supposed to mean “This is interesting, maybe you’ll like it too.” but I’m not leaving many comments anymore either.

Huh.

I know that lots of blogs get lots of comments on some posts. Often so many comments that I don’t know if I want to dive into that pool. Which becomes a circular argument. We don’t comment when there are lots of comments because often there is no way to manage that discussion. Maybe we don’t comment for a similar reason—that coming back for the discussion is more effort than it’s worth.

And I don’t have any answers (sorry).

I would love to know what you think about a post. I would love to extend, expand, and elaborate on the topic. I also don’t want the discussion to become so unwieldy that readers feel they can’t comment.

Maybe if there were a way to have a Twitter hashtag for each post, automatically generated, that if you tweet with that hashtag that tweet becomes part of the post. Hmm, that sounds like an idea. Oh HootSuite, maybe that could be a little pet project? Dave? Maybe Melanie and PostRank are well equipped to pull it off.

Well I’ll just have to see what comes through in the comments, won’t I?

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