Your users are everything to you. For any brand, be it a service, be it a platform or even a blog, your audience sums up your entire outlook.
By community I mean, your users, your followers, your critics and your appraisers. Basically every single human that visits your website. (We will not be talking about robots) I guess I missed out that other brands are also part of your community.
I don't think any brand has been successful without this thing called as engagement. It's the single most important entity required to generate the traction to make your brand big.
I am sure you use social media and it can be used a great manner to engage with your community. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have all shown amazing results for popular news websites like The Next Web, The Verge, TechCrunch and Mashable.
To specifically point out The Next Web, they have over 800,000 followers on Twitter, 100,000 Facebook followers and a massive 1.4m followers on Google+.
We all know what Social Media Marketing. And trust me, it's not dead. It has transformed into a completely different platform. Instead of promoting their websites, they have started involving their community.
If you remove the amount of content they have on their website and remove all other backlinks, a major chunk of traffic is generated from the posts their users generate. Their posts have over 300+ shares on an average on a variety of media and these shares just keep on increasing exponentially.
But all of this is not just limited to social sharing.
They use commenting channels which stir up debates, discussions and keep the users coming back.
The Next Web uses Disqus. Mashable relies on Livefyre. TechCrunch makes use of Facebook commenting. And The Verge asks you to make an account to particpate in discussions.
So, lets consider these four popular options used by the most popular tech blogs on the internet.
- Disqus
- Livefyre
- Facebook comments
- Your native website platform
Disqus supports the maximum number of platforms including WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla and Blogger.
It has some pretty amazing features like Discovery which allows one to find other popular content on the website. You can even view the stats of any user in particular and get a detailed description. The best part about it is that you can get analytics and the API is very powerful.
Pros:
- Installing is a no-brainer
- The amount of features are just amazing
- API
Cons:
- Need an account to comment
Livefyre is my next best choice to Disqus, but it comes with it's own set of advantages.
Pros:
- Allows you to login via your Livefyre account, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and OpenID
- The most versatile thing out there
- A point system which is used in a great manner
Cons:
- Doesn't support as many platforms as Disqus
They also have another product know as Livefyre Streamhub which is way more powerful than there standard commenting system. It boasts with the power to customize the entire experience for the user and websites like The Daily Beast and Showtime have been using it. You can actually notice the differnce betweet there two platforms. Though, Streamhub is recommended for websites with over 20m pageviews.
Now we come to the very popular and easy to use Facebook Social Plugin. Enter the URL of your website and you are good to go. A major chuck of average readers use Facebook, and there's a high chance that someone might have discovered your content from Facebook, so why not give them the opportunity to use a platform they are familiar with.
Pros:
- Easy to setup
Cons:
- It's too Facebooky
If you haven't heard of Smashing Magazine, then do visit their website. They have been contributing to the design community in their own way. They run a small event every month, that invites all designers to send their wallpapers which are then showcased on the website. BTW, Smashing Mag uses WordPress comments on their site. So, these designers have something to look forward to, because the reach of the platform is such that it gives them a lot of audience to showcase their work to.
At the moment, even my laptop's wallpaper is one showcased on Smashing Mag's January/13 edition.
Display their picture somewhere. This is not a widely used technique, to be true, this is quite niche, but what one of my friends did. He used jQuery Boastful written by Zach Holman. And he put it up quite nicely on his website - 64notes.