Today we have a big update to share and want to know what you think. Reactions are now available for all publishers on Disqus. Reactions are a fun, low-effort, means for readers to engage on their favorite sites and for publishers to better understand their audiences.
Engagement matters
In a landscape where readers have more options than ever for content and third parties have more control over how readers find and engage with content, publishers need to emphasize building strong relationships with their readers. Getting readers to actively participate is key to developing stronger relationships. Readers who engage consume, on average, 4 times as much content compared to passive readers. Converting more passive readers to active participants means more time on site, direct traffic, and audience loyalty. As investments in third party platforms increasingly fail to back out into meaningful ROI, the publishers that successfully build loyal, engaged audiences stand to gain sustainable advantages.
Reactions increase your engaged audience
Publishers that enabled Reactions as part of our beta test saw, on average, increases of 600% in engagement. This means more active participation from readers, better signals about article performance, and stronger relationships.
How Reactions work for Publishers and Readers
Publishers: Publishers can enable Reactions from the new Reactions tab within their Disqus admin settings. When enabling Reactions, publishers have options to configure the number of available reactions, the associated emojis, and text. The default configuration contains 6 options and publishers can limit the number of reactions on their sites to as few as two.
Readers: We aim to make engaging with publishers as easy as possible for readers. Anyone, whether they have a Disqus account or not, can react on any site that has the Reactions feature enabled with just one click.
What do you think?
As you probably guessed, the Reactions feature is enabled for this post. Be sure to react to let us know what you think. We’re already working on additional functionality including analytics for publishers and more image / emoji options. If you have ideas or feedback about how we can make Reactions better for publishers, readers, or both, be sure to let us know by leaving a comment below.