Comments Box Best Practices | November 2011
Comments Box Best practices What is it? The Comments Box is a social plugin that makes it easy for people to leave comments on your site. Whether you have a blog, news site, or online store, the Comments Box encourages quality conversations, displays the most relevant comments first, and drives traffic to your site.
How does it work? With just a few lines of code, you can let people use their Facebook account to comment on content on your site and publish it to Facebook for their friends to see and react to.
‣ Quality Conversations: People that are signed in to Facebook can immediately see comments from their friends, and they can leave comments without needing to create another account. When Facebook users leave comments on your site, their content is associated with their real name, profile photo and other public information —encouraging civil and thoughtful conversations. The Comments Box also lets people login Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail. ‣ Social Relevancy & Moderation: The Comments Box automatically promotes comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked discussion threads. Admins can alternatively choose to set the default sort to chronological or reverse chronological order. Moderators can also boost comments to pin them at the top and spur discussion. To minimize spam, the Comment Box enables you to hide comments, blacklist words and ban users. In addition, you can choose to make unmoderated comments visible to everyone or just the commenters’ friends.
We found using Facebook Comments increased the civility of our local news comment threads and greatly reduced the amount of abusive comments, doing away with nearly all anonymous users. Mitch Gelman Vice President, Product at Gannett Digital
‣ Social Distribution: When a user leaves a comment on your site with the “Post to Profile” box checked, a story will appear in his friends’ News Feed with a link back to your site. His friends can then continue the conversation right from their News Feed and those replies will be syndicated back to your site. Commenters can also @mention others in their replies to streamline long threads and notify the original commenter of their activity.