Getting That Coveted Back-and-Forth Dialogue With Your Visitors

bymerlynmac

3K followers

5 years ago

This is a short post but I wanted to let everyone know they're missing something important in getting that back-and-forth dialogue going with their site visitors. This issue actually came to my attention when talking about the Site Comments tool and I didn't go back and check, but I don't recall it being discussed in any of the training I went through when I started here at WA.

The Problem

Did you know that when someone leaves a comment, by default, that's it, there's no notification to them that you've approved or even replied to it? Unless they happen to come back and look for a response, your engagement just ended right there.

Have you used the Site Comments tool, left comments with questions in an effort to show engagement and then never got a response? Chances are you did, you were just never notified. I bet, if you go back to the Site Comments tool's Comments Offered section and look at the history, if click on one or more pages you've left comments on, you'll see replies to your comments and maybe even a question or two designed to generate a back-and-forth discussion with the posts author. Depending on how long ago you left the comment, I bet the author thought they lost you and in a way they did.

The Solution

Luckily the fix is rather easy. Yep, another plugin. There are many options out there including sophisticated solutions that will allow your commenter to subscribe to their own comment thread, a posts comment thread (theirs and others) and so on but each one I've looked at requires the commenter to check a box or select various options, making it cumbersome and adding another step that might make them think "This is too much work, I'm not going to comment after all.". If you want a sophisticated solution with those bells and whistles, go for it. For me I chose a minimal solution that was actually brought to my attention by Bald Eagle here on WA. That solution is called "Comment Approved Notifier Extended".

The whole purpose of this plugin is to simply notify the author of a comment when it's been approved. It won't say hey you've gotten a reply or you've been rejected, it will just let the author of a comment know that they've been approved once they have been.

Things to Know

There are a couple of issues to be aware of if you use this plugin:

1) If the author gave an invalid e-mail address, or didn't provide one at all, they won't get the notification.

2) If you want to use this for engagement, don't simply approve the comment, reply to it and then click Approve and Reply. That way, when they get the approval notice, and follow the link or return to the post, they will see that you've replied to their comment and will hopefully respond to your reply.

3) The e-mail looks something like this:

"Dear <Commentor's Name Here>,

Your comment is approved to this post:"<Post Title Here>"You can see your comment from following address: <Link To Your Comment Here>

Your Comment:

<Commentor's Comment Here>"

I'm sure there's a way to customize this if you edit config files but otherwise this is it.

4) There are no settings to configure or templates to configure like other plugins allow so, unless you want to find the raw file and edit it, the default is it.

Conclusion

I know it's one more plugin but I think it's one worth installing. On the plus side, this is a simple plugin that you install and that's it. It works great and will now notify your commenters that you've approved their comment, hopefully getting them to come take a look and see your reply.

On the down-side, you really can't customize it, at least not easily. There are more complicated solutions out there and if they offer what you want then, by all means, go for it, but, if you want a simple solution to fix, what I consider, a big problem, give "Comment Approved Notifier Extended" a try.

I hope you found this post helpful. Please comment below and let me know your thoughts, offer a better solution if you have one, rant and rave if you think I've gone off my rocker, etc.

Again, thanks to Bald Eagle for sharing with me the plugin he uses to address this issue. Now I'm sharing it with you.

Scott