A couple of weeks ago we released Audience Analytics to help remove some of the mystery around the people who engage on your website.
Now we want to provide you with some tips on how to make the most of these insights to turn your readers into loyal engagers. To do this, we're publishing a new series focused on three main topics:
- Turning Readers into Engagers
- Growing your base of returning visitors
- Promoting Community Members
Getting Readers to Engage
The Overview section of Audience Analytics provides you with a quick glance at the total number of unique Comment Readers as well as the total number of unique readers who become Engaged Readers.
Comment Readers represent the opportunity size of people who are reading the comments and could decide to engage by commenting or voting. Engaged readers are more likely to view additional pages on your website and to return in the future, which is why getting them to engage is so important.
3 Techniques for Getting Readers to Engage
Experiment with different content
If you're only posting long reviews and editorials, then you might be missing out on opportunities for your community to engage with your content. There's a place for long editorials, but content that is shorter and easier to consume sometimes helps get long-time readers and lurkers started with content that is easier to engage with.
A great example of approachable content can be found on 9to5Mac where most of their content is breaking news made up of 400 words or less. However, they do a great job at branching out and covering more open topics such as feature requests and polls.
Feature Requests
Polls
Show comment counts on articles
In addition to social sharing icons, comment counts provide visitors with a sense of the amount of activity taking place on each story, as well as an easy method for finding the comment section on perhaps an page with longer content.
A comment count is something easy to add and customize. Read our tutorial on how to implement it on your site in just a few steps. Here are a few good examples:
Homepage feed from Batman-News.com:
Individual stories on Pioneer Woman:
Promote your most active content
HYPEBEAST does a great job at this by leveraging engagement signals from Disqus and other platforms to generate a "Hype score", while also providing content sorts generated using a story's total number of comments.
For more in-depth tips and strategies for driving engagement, check out our comprehensive reader engagement guide.
Next in this series we'll discuss the Snapshot of Engaged Readers from the Audience Analysis page and talk ways to grow your base of returning users who are engaged.
In the mean time, let us know if you have other ideas for converting Readers into Engagers!