Facebook Engagement Strategies

What has worked for you?

[Nick_W]

Hi everyone,

I run a website that works like this: FB Fan -> Email Subscriber -> Customer.

I'd like to get more engagement so my posts reach more of my fans. So... I also need a way for subscribers/customers to provide feedback and ask for help. is there a way to tie FB comments (perhaps from my website) to my FB page so that all the comments count toward engagement, or do I need to point clients to the FB page and tell them just to comment there directly?

Sheesh.. I wrote that 3 times and it's still confusing as hell.. hhh!

[bill]

Facebook does let you use their commenting system on your own site. Would that work for you?

[Nick_W]

Hi Bill. Yes, thats what I meant. Turns out to be way complicated though!

[Robert Charlton]

Facebook does let you use their commenting system on your own site.

I just commented on a major newspaper site that was using Facebook comments... and I found that the comment was prominently featured, along with the original newspaper story, on my timeline on Facebook. I didn't see whether it appeared in my news feed.

Whichever... depending on your FB following, this might be a much more powerful way to share a comment and reach out than a comment on a site's native comment system could accomplish by itself. (I should add that I found the newspaper story via Twitter search.)

The tradeoff with the FB commenting system, as I understand it, is that the content is on your Facebook page, not on the article that's on your site. I'm wondering whether... for Google... this is as effective as a native commenting system that would be leaving the comments on your site. Essentially, I'm assuming, you get more outreach with the FB comments, but less direct search benefit... though the comments are there on your site for your site visitors to read.

There's also the question about whether the direct search benefit from user comments is as meaningful as the outreach and diversification of the comments on FB.

Yes, it is way complicated.

[Nick_W]

Hi Robert. Yep. You got it.

And it really gets interesting if you make it so that all your comments are tied to the same url --this means instead of having different comment streams for each page/post you have just one. The benefit is that when "Robert just commented on..." shows up in your friends news feeds and they click it, they can be sent to your pre-defined landing page rather than some blog post.

Also, the increased activity affects your edge rank on FB (so i understand, i am not an expert here by any means..)

Im pretty sure fb comments wont show for google. but in this case fb is my main traffic / user acquisition platform not google so it doesn't matter.

I have a freelancer figuring this out for me now. Turns out there is a fb plugin for this but that it's still a little beyond me to configure myself..

[engine]

Nick_W has the right idea in deciding which type of traffic is important. Once you know that, deciding which route to take for your own site is a little easier.

With so many different ways to implement commenting, and to comment, it's becoming a minefield.

Do let us know how you get on with the choice.