As engagement and sharing on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools continues to increase, many bloggers are noticing a sharp decrease in comments on their blogs.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that interest is declining.  RSS and email subscriptions, site traffic and social sharing may all be continuing to increase.  These are tracked through a variety of tools and even popular commenting system Disqus scours social networks to find blog posts being shared and displays those as “interactions”.

Increasingly bloggers are concerned that even though they know that their posts are being shared through other channels, that their communities still aren’t commenting on their posts.  It’s a completely understandable feeling.  You work hard at putting together a thought or position, flesh it out, find an engaging photo or video to help enhance your point and then publish it to the world.  A comment makes us feel good and/or helps to extend the post itself.  Sometimes the comments are even better than the post.  So, when a blogger begins noticing a decrease of comments on their blog, it can be depressing.  It can cause bloggers to start rethinking their content strategy and possibly even considering whether or not they should continue blogging.

Every time I’ve been asked whether or not a blogger should be discouraged by a decrease in comments, I immediately ask them whether or not they’ve looked at the sharing of their post through other channels and what the feedback from those channels are.  Usually they tell me that their seeing their content being shared online but they still wish they were getting the comments on their blog.

I’ve been thinking about this often.  Admittedly, I comment a lot less than I used but I share tons more now.  Google Reader trends tell me that I share around 30 articles per day through there.  I also regularly share tons more through Twitter and Facebook throughout the day.  But, I probably comment on about 75% less blogs than a year or so ago.  I know, I need to improve on that.

However, as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been considering whether or not the decline in commenting is actually a bad thing.  If you stop by and comment on a blog, you may extend that conversation and/or let that blogger know that you appreciate their work.  Both are great.  Consider though that the conversation will only be seen by that community which is limited by the number of subscribers and the number of visitors to that blog.  But, if you share that blog post with your community on Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, then you’re promoting that content to your social graph thus extending the total overall reach of that post.  By sharing that post with your social graph, it will extend the number of eyes that may be seeing that blog for the very first time.  Or, if they’ve ignored other content from that blog, it may be that post that pulls them in and triggers them to subscribe or share it with their networks thus continuing to grow the overall subscriber base and reach of the blog.

You may think that I’m suggesting that comments are dead but I’m not.  I love comments as much as the next blogger.  I appreciate everyone that takes the time out to share their thoughts.  I also value everyone that shares my content with their social graphs because it helps to get my content out to more people.

It’s just something I’ve been debating in my own head lately so I figured I’d spill it out into a blog post and see what you had to say and where you may choose to say it.  So, what are your thoughts?  Do you prefer comments, social sharing or a combination of both as a measure of the engagement on your blog?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: premasagar

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Facebook Marketing.  If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, you can check out this excerpt, read a few reviews and then decide if you think it will be helpful to you.

With Facebook starting out as a personal network, it has been a hard transition for people to become used to it as also a professional network.  Most use LinkedIn as a professional network, Facebook as a personal network, and Twitter is a hybrid that people are still trying to figure out.  But with the growth rate of Facebook, many have started to turn to it as a personal branding tool and professional network.  Marketers have begun turning to Facebook with Facebook Pages, Groups, and advertising as a way to reach out to their prospects, customers, and fans.

This transition has created a dilemma for many folks because they are resistant to using Facebook as a professional network, yet their colleagues, competition, and companies are become active on the network.  Also, as we develop friends in our industries, we want to extend that friendship and therefore turn to Facebook.  This starts to blur that line even further between work and home.  However, as Dawn Foster of WebWorkerDaily points out, we don’t want to confuse “personal” for “private”:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort.  When we talk about ‘being personal’ on social media websites, I think that many people confuse ‘personal’ with ‘private.’  The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

To deal with this dilemma, individuals typically have three options to choose from:

1. Maintain a single Facebook profile that combines personal and professional.
2. Maintain two different Facebook profiles: one personal and one professional.
3. Keeping Facebook only personal and not mixing work into it.

Each of these has both upsides and downsides with not one clear answer or best practice, as of yet.  Thought it might not be clear yet, this will be important for you as a marketer.  Let’s explore each of these options.

Single Facebook Profile

If you don’t mind mixing personal and professional, you can maintain a single Facebook profile in which all engagement with the platform originates from that one profile.  This enables people to get to know the real you.  It’s just like the two faces that most wear on a daily basis: the way you are at your office and the way you are at home, with friends, or family.

Although so many of us are used to this split personality, why should we act like this?  Why can’t we be the same person at work as we are at home, maybe just dressed up a little nicer?  You have the same likes and dislikes, the same problems and victories, and your family, friends, enemies, colleagues and competitors don’t change when you’re at work versus when you’re at home.

Furthermore, realizing its growth, Facebook has continued to add features that allow you to tweak your privacy settings to allow you to use a single profile but limit access to data sets based on permissions, lists, and rules that you set up.  This means that you can create a list of your colleagues and then deny that list access to certain aspects of your profile.  By setting this up properly, you can achieve the privacy and separation that you want while not having to bother with two separate profiles or avoiding Facebook as a professional network.

Two Different Facebook Profiles

If you want to maintain split personas, between your personal and professional lives, you can create two different Facebook profiles.  One Facebook profile you can create as your personal account in which you upload personal photos, videos, and bio info.  This is the account where you interact with your friends, family, and others that you allow into your personal circle.  Just remember to use a personal email account and not one that anyone in your professional life knows.  If you use the same email, you open your personal profile to being found by colleagues.  Of course, you can always ignore the friend request, but it much easier and simpler to just use a separate email account.

The second account should be set up under a work email address that your colleagues would use to search for you.  Under this profile you can upload any professional content that you would like to share.  To reduce confusion between these two profiles, you should consider hiding one of the profiles from Facebook searches and indexing by search engines.  This can be done through the privacy settings for your profile(s).  Which one to hide is up to you, or you can hide both, if you want.

Not Mixing Personal and Work

Your last option is to simply not mix personal and work.  Some people decide that the easiest route is just not to promote their presence on Facebook.  They maintain Facebook as their personal social network and use LinkedIn as their professional network to connect with colleagues.  For those wanting to maintain that separation between personal and work, you might find this to be your cleanest option.

What’s your take? Do you maintain separate profiles or use a single profile for all engagement?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: laikolosse

Have you had a chance to pick up your copy of Facebook Marketing yet?  If you’re still deciding whether or not it is worth your $20-ish, you might wander over to a few of the reviews so far of Facebook Marketing to see if that helps to convince you.

First up is a video review by Chris Brogan:

Next, here are a few other reviews that you may find interesting:

• Tim Peter – Facebook Marketing by Justin R. Levy (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• Valley PR Blog – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• Deidre Breakenridge – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• iMedia Connection – 6 Beach Books for Marketers
• Get Social PR – Facebook Marketing 9-Part Series

If you’ve written up a review of Facebook Marketing, please let me know in the comments.  I will keep this post updated with more reviews as I find them.

If you have already read Facebook Marketing, would you mind leaving a rating and review over on Amazon?

Most importantly, thank YOU for all of your support since the book launch!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Today Facebook launched the ability to reply to comments (status updates, photos, videos, and Wall posts) via email.

While this isn’t a major platform upgrade, it would appear that it will drive more engagement with Facebook.  This will occur for 3 main reasons:

1. Many of us live in our email therefore we’re likely to respond faster to an email then if we have to log in to Facebook to leave a follow up comment.
2. This reduces the number of steps required to post a response to Facebook once an email notification was received.  Prior to this upgrade you would receive the notification, click the link in the body of email, log in to Facebook, and then leave a comment.  Now, you receive the email notification, hit “Reply”, type your response and hit “Send”. Much simpler, if you ask me.
3. As ReadWriteWeb notes, employees who work at companies where Facebook is blocked will now be able to engage on Facebook throughout the course of the work day.  They may have been able to make these updates via a smartphone like an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid previously but the risk of getting caught is much higher.  We all know that person that we’ve seen with their head down in their lap all day long texting, playing on Facebook or checking Twitter from their phone.

In my experiences, I tend to respond faster when I can use email as the communications tool.  When I moved my blogs over the Disqus commenting system, I immediately began responding to comments faster because I could easily respond via email.  I think the same thing will happen with Facebook.  I do a decent job responding to comments on Facebook but definitely think that this will increase my engagement with the platform.

Over the past several months of working on my book, Facebook Marketing (affiliate link), it has been very interesting to watch Facebook continue to evolve.  Besides always trying to stay up on everything going around around the social web, I have kept a close eye on what’s happening with Facebook.

Now if they could just enable email notifications for Facebook Pages, the world would rejoice, fireworks would be shot from rooftops and we would all sing carols.  Well, maybe not the fireworks but it would still be very helpful for those of us who manage a Facebook Page, nevermind for those who manage a handful of them.

But, until that happens, I’ll focus on this newest update.  What do YOU think of this new update to Facebook?  Will you engage more via email?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: Tom Whitnah

Today is a special day for me as I announce signing my first book deal.  I have inked a deal with Pearson Education/Que Publishing to write a book tenatively titled Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign.  The book is slated for release in January.

My goal with the book is to provide you with a solid overview of where Facebook has come from, where I believe it’s going and then in between all of that, how you can fully utilize the platform to become a trust agent both as an individual and as a business.  I plan on showing you how to build a marketing plan with Facebook as an integral part of that plan, best in class examples, case studies and a ton more.  This won’t be a gimmicky “you should join Facebook”-type book.  I want this to be the type of book that might get you to look at Facebook through a different lens.  I want this book to give you another cannon on your ship from which fire from.  With this book I want to provide you with maps that will help you to chart a course using Facebook that will be helpful to you and your company.

This is an exciting next phase for me as I’ve always wondered whether I had the chops to write a book.  Now we’ll see.  I love challenges and this certainly is going to be a big challenge for me.  Over the coming weeks and months I’ll take you behind-the-scenes and share my experiences as I go through the processes of writing and releasing a book.

As always, thank you for all of the support that you give me.  My hope is that I’m helpful to you in some way that allows you to grow.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo by: avrdreamer

Recently Robert Scoble interviewed Caitlin O’Farrell for the new building43 site which was recently launched by Robert and the team over at RackSpace.  Caitlin is the program manager for consumer marketing at Facebook.  Caitlin spends her time working with celebrities or, as she notes, their publicists, to provide them with a Facebook presence.

One of the key ways of accomplishing this is through a Facebook Page.  As being someone that manages multiple Pages and Groups on Facebook, I was very interested to watch this interview.  Even though I spend hours each day on Facebook, there is so much development taking place by both Facebook and application developers that it’s hard to keep up.

Check out Robert’s interview with Caitlin:

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2230062&dest=-1]

Two resources that Caitlin pointed out that I didn’t know Facebook provided were the Facebook Influencers and Facebook Marketing resource pages.  I’m going to spend a little time poking around there for new ideas, best practices and to see what some the featured pages are doing.

Caitlin definitely left me with a list of ideas I now have for updating my fan pages and groups.  It was also a nice prod to get in there and maintain interaction in the various pages.  I think one of the normal things that happens in a lot of social networks (at least it happens to me) is that you set up a page, group, or forum where you want to build a community.  But, because of other work, home or other page responsibilities, the pages, groups or forums don’t receive the level of attention that they deserve.

Remember when you build these communities you have to stay active in them.  You have people that join them beacuse they care about the subject or brand that the community is based around.  Be that community manager that they need and want whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn or any other community you may be a part of.

If you want some more information on Facebook Pages, check out this excellent and comprehensive whitepaper by C.C. Chapman and his team over at The Advance Guard: About Face

If you’re so inclined, jump onboard my two main pages: Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse and Inbound Marketing Summit.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1997625&dest=-1]

Episode #1 – Wednesday, April 8, 2009
(Episode Length: 22 minutes, 21 seconds)

Intro

• You can join us live every Wednesday at 12p ET (9a PT) over at New Marketing TV which gets hijacked and changed to Pirates TV.
• To interact with us, you can catch up with us on Twitter: @justinlevy or @crbrowning.  Also, make sure to tag your questions, comments or feedback with #piratestv.
• Lunch with the Pirates is jumping on board with all of the other live broadcasts.  Some of our friends include: HubSpot TV, Permission TV and Blue Sky Factory TV.  It is so easy to start and cheap to start a “TV show” nowadays but, are there companies that shouldn’t start a live online broadcast?

Pirate Marketing Moves

• Skittles - Was it just a publicity stunt to get conversation going?  Colin doesn’t think so.  Colin believes that Skittles was turning the conversation over to their customers.  Thoughts?
• iRoadTrip – The first iRoadTrip saw the team travel through the heartland of America to visit with true American innovators.  Next trips include an iRoadTrip sustainable innovations and education.  Disclosure: This is a New Marketing Labs project…

What’s in the Spyglass?

• New Beta FriendFeed – Is it Twitter or is it Facebook?  I tend to think that it looks similar to the new version of Facebook.  This is very interesting because there were a lot of conversations around Facebook ripping off FriendFeed when they first released the “Like” feature.  However, this beta version of FriendFeed looks very similar to the Facebook stream.

…and with that concludes our first episode.  We actually recorded a few more minutes but realized that the camera stopped taping.  Oh well, we’ll keep improving each week, we promise

We know what we liked and what we want to improve upon but now we want to hear from you.  What did you think?  What can we do better?  Did you find the topics interesting?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Facebook continues to grow at a breakneck pace of approximately 600,000 new users per day along with more than 140 million active users of the service.  With so many features built into the service and many additional features that can be added on to extend Facebook, it is only appropriate to put together a list of the 17 ways to interact on Facebook.

9 Ways to Use Facebook to Connect and Interact

1. Use the “Notes” feature to pull in your blog feed.  Once set up, it will ping your blog platform and post any new posts as a new note in Facebook.
2. Share interesting links using the “Share Link” feature.
3. Change your notification settings to be notified when someone you know has a birthday coming up.  Then make sure you tell them “Happy Birthday!”  It’s a nice surprise, especially if it’s someone who you don’t keep in touch with that often.
4. Join Groups that you care about and then actually interact in them.  A lot of people join groups but then don’t use them.  These are a great area to network with people who share similar interests as you especially around specific topics.
5. Upload photos (2, 30, 150, 2,000 or whatever).  It’s a great way to connect with people on a more personal level.  Of course, only upload photos that you’re comfortable with sharing.  If you have photos with other friends that are on Facebook, tag them in the photos.
6. If you own a company or are responsible for marketing/PR/social media, set up a Fan Page and use it.  Upload photos, videos, send updates to your fans and all of the other great features.  You can even use the fan page to build and publish an ad on Facebook.
7. Record a video directly into Facebook or upload a couple.  Pictures are a great way to connect but videos are another great way to interact too.
8. Comment on links, photos, videos and statuses that others post.  Posting on walls is great but try using the “Comment” feature.
9. Add in other social applications such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Google Reader, etc.  These will post links to your feed when you use those services.

These are just a few of the many, many ways to use Facebook to interact and connect more with your friends.  What are some of the other ways that you use Facebook to be more social?

While catching up on my RSS feeds tonight, I came across a new cartoon from HubSpot.  The title of this new cartoon is: “Facebook in Real Life: Throwing Sheep”.

This cartoon made me laugh a lot and reminded me of this video that I came across last year:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs[/youtube]

If you haven’t checked out the series of cartoons that HubSpot has been producing lately, take a look at them….they’re pretty funny

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.