If you’ve been reading my blog up until now, you may notice a change in the comments section. I’m now using Facebook comments instead of the built-in comments feature in WordPress. While this may not be a major change for my site visitors, I did want to use this decision as a case study to show how I think solopreneurs should think through things.
First, I was displeased with the way comments were working. Even with a spam catcher plugin, I still got several hundred spam comments for every real comment. Many of them were obviously spam, but I still had to at least scan them to make sure I didn’t throw away any gold. This took several minutes at least a few times per week, and this adds no value to my business. This year, my 6th in business, I’m working on streamlining and dropping things that don’t work. I’ve ditched all assumptions and am even more active with testing everything to see if it works for me. So, with that attitude, I decided to rethink if I even wanted comments at all.
After researching the various options, I decided to try Facebook comments. My research suggest that this will cut down on spam and increase the quality of comments. I also like that people can easily share their comment with their Facebook connections. Overall, it’s gotten harder to to get people to take the time to comment and if that’s the case I’d rather have them share my content to start a conversation.
I hope the new comment plan works well. If I make another change, I’ll detail that decision in a later post.