Testing Facebook Comments
If you keep on scrolling down past this article to the comment area, you’ll see that we’re trying out the new Facebook commenting system. I’ll go over if it’s right for your scuba blog.
However, the old (Disqus) commenting system is still available for now.
Facebook Comments for your SCUBA Blog
Should you implement Facebook’s comment system for your scuba blog? Utilizing their commenting system gives you:
- Additional exposure to potential scuba customers. Any time someone comments on your, their comments will (unless they specifically choose not to) appear on their Wall. All comments can go to your Wall, or your Page’s Wall, automatically.
- Conversation promotion. If someone comments via FB on one of your visitors comments, that comment feeds back to your scuba site automatically.
- Referral traffic. FB has over 400 million registered users and promoting your scuba blog to those users is greatly beneficial, so syndicating your comments should only help your scuba site with referral traffic.
There are some negatives to consider:
- No way (currently) to import old comments. If you already have comments on your scuba blog, there’s no way to import them into the FB comment system.
- Limited sign in options. Right now, you either need a Facebook, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo! account to login and leave a comment. Speculation is that they will add Google and Twitter. Not everyone is on FB.
- Easy export. There are ways, although not easy for the layperson to export your new comments. I would like for it to automagically sync with my scuba blog database so I have a backup should I decide not to continue using this system.
- Minimum width. FB recommends a minimum width of 400 pixels (there doesn’t appear to be a percentage option) which doesn’t look so great on smartphones in portrait orientation. With that in mind, this site defaults back to Disqus for comments on mobile devices.
Those negatives are big enough to keep me running a second comment system for the time being.
