Often, news blasts and company updates are one-way transmissions from a business to a recipient list or client base. With blogging through athlete’s websites, everything becomes more personal, creating more intimate and specialized discussions through content sharing. Opening up your blog to facilitate two-way discussion can help build and maintain your audience through acknowledgment of and encouragement of their input.
A comment form on each of athlete’s website pages, lets readers know that athletes and their brands value their input, feedback, and commentary. These audiences of readers, clients and potential customers want to be engaged in discussions and know that their opinions matter to your business.
According to Technorati’s State of the Blogoshphere, when bloggers are online engagement in web activities, 84% comment on articles or blog posts. These bloggers also have commenting enabled on their blog, which allows readers to add to what they have just read, make suggestions, or answer a question posed in the entry. Bloggers are social beings. Conversational bloggers, whether on their own blog or others, open entire sites to various audiences.
A blog post on athlete’s website with a conversational tone, while still being professional, welcomes the audience to become a part of content athletes and their brands are creating and broadcasting. Through comments and feedback, you can get a feel for what makes your audience and customers tick, and you can tailor your posts to meet their needs.
By requesting feedback, polling your audience, or asking a question at the end of your blog post, you put out a welcome message for readers to add their comments to the discussion you have started. And if you take time to update your post with answers, you have entered 2-way online discussion with your readers.
In the professional blogging world, comments are highly regarded. When you see a comment, this means that particular reader was moved enough by your content to write a message. Many bloggers measure blog’s success by the amount of comments they receive.
If your blog has plenty of comments, this means that you have successfully engaged in two-way online discussion.