When everyone's commenting on your blog post, they just aren't commenting on your website

A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tell me this isn’t familiar: You spent all this time crafting a blog post, you post it and… no one comments on it. At all. You can practically hear the crickets through the internet. You feel like writing that post was a huge waste of time.

Or you experience the strange post-social networking version of this. You post an article and it’s immediately retweeted on Twitter and shared like wildfire around Facebook. Friends and strangers alike post comment after comment about your post on their social networks. And, while you’re flattered that people liked what you wrote and are relieved to be getting some kind of feedback, you also kind of want to scream, “Why are none of you freaking people commenting on the actual post?!?!?!”

You could switch your site over to Facebook comments to at least collect some of that discussion back on your site but that comes with its own host of problems and still doesn’t round up discussions on other networks. I find this frustrating because I think a good discussion in the comments can sometimes be half the value of a post and I wish those comments were here on the blog for everyone to read instead of trapped out of context in some social network that could go away at anytime.

But, on the flip side, I understand why people prefer to comment on the social networks instead of on the website itself. On Facebook or Twitter, only your friends are likely to see your comment. It feels much less “public” so we feel more free to speak our mind.

Does this mean that the blog comment itself is dead? Or is getting people to post on the website itself a sort of art form of asking just the right questions at the end of the post or sparking just enough discussion? Many of the posts I write on this blog don’t feel like they need audience participation, sometimes I just have something I want to share or tell you and I feel like your reading it, nodding your head and then sharing it is the ideal response. But does my feeling like that indicate that I’m doing it wrong?

I’d ask you to share your thoughts below but that feels too meta… 😉