Today we are trying out something interesting. We switch on Facebook comment for the few next posts to be used parallel to our in-house comment system and want to get a feel of how users react on this move.
Why use Facebook comment now?
Due to the fact that our Facebook fan base is reaching 5.000 users we thought it makes sense to allow people to interact and express their opinions using Facebook comment system. This way ideas are spread more broadly and will attract more interactions from friends outside of JoomlArt's loyal readership.
What is good if we use Facebook comment?
1. It is more engaging and we are reaching more people outside Joomla guys as well. It allows FB followers of a commenter on our blog post to read/like/share, which would not be visible to those followers with traditional comment system.
2. Good for decreasing our page size. By using FB comment plugin it will take down the css and loading time from our site, as it loads external sheets and files.
3. Because of Facebook's impressive statistics
What is bad if we use Facebook?
These are countries where Facebook is officially blocked.
From our JoomlArt Google analytics, in the last month (16.07.-15.08.2011) we had visits from:
- Iran (4239 visits)
- China (3880 visits)
- Pakistan (2647 visits)
- Egypt (2067 visits)
- Bangladesh (no data available "not set data" = 1650 visits)
- Syria (190 visits)
- Uzbekistan (85 visits)
As a consequence this means that if we would use Facebook comment only, we would block potentially 14k visits in total from reading the comments on our website.
But as a matter of fact, this represents only a very small ratio of the whole visitor distribution and even fewer in terms of paying members. And anyway, if people really want to use Facebook, there are lots of tricks to outwit the block, but we won't talk about it here.
Short Note about Disqus & Intense Debate
There are two other big players in the field of hosted commenting services, which are Disqus and Intense Debate. Both offer users to post comments with their Disqus account (Intense Debate respectively) or Facebook, Twitter or openID accounts and any commenting activity will show up in their public stream. But with either system, we have some dependencies and issues to consider when opting for one of those.
We decided to give FB comment a first try and see how it will impact activity of JA community and their friends. We believe it will make commenting more social and more fun. We will keep observing the reactions and will share a more detailed analysis with you soon.
Further reading:
- http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2011/05/18/facebook-comments-vs-disqus-which-is-better/
- http://tvtechgirl.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-facebook-comments-killed-techcrunch.html
- http://socialmediaseo.net/2011/03/31/facebook-vs-disqus-facebook-comments-increased-by-155/
Do you like using Facebook comment?
- What is your favorite way to post comments?
- Do you want to share your comments with your network or better keep it within a closed community?