Social Media Optimization For Dummies

Chapter 8

Inspiring User Engagement

In This Chapter

• Encouraging visitor participation
• Working with social discussion tools

Getting people to engage with you on your site is one of the holy grails of digital marketing. Two of the easiest ways to do this are to offer website comments and discussion forums.

Remember when websites had guestbooks? Online commenting and discussion have come a long way since then, growing into powerful channels for engaging with website visitors. Widespread adoption by big brands and publishers shows the effectiveness of providing discussion tools for site visitors. These features are so common now that if you find a major website without a comments box, it seems a little odd.

Tapping into the engagement potential of comments and discussions can be a challenge, however, with technical and management issues. This chapter explains how you can approach engagement and how providing a place where people can discuss your content can enhance your social media optimization (SMO).

Inviting Comments and Discussion

Providing users a way to voice their opinions and add their thoughts to your content items is a valuable and effective way of creating engagement right on the pages of your website. Although comments are most often thought of in the context of a blog, the effectiveness of the functionality merits a much broader implementation. Users who are willing to take time to add a comment are much more likely to engage with you in other ways. In other words, ...