By making commenting easier for both frequent readers and newcomers, Disqus encourages discussion on your website and stimulates more traffic and word-of-mouth sharing as a result. Despite having been founded just five short years ago, the Disqus commenting platform has grown exponentially in popularity, and is used by more than half a billion people on some of the biggest sites on the web. To see for yourself what makes Disqus a preferred choice for so many different people, consider the following top five content marketing benefits of using Disqus as a commenting platform.
1. Sign-in From Multiple Credentials
Only the most devoted commenters and frequent readers will go through the trouble of creating a completely new account on your website just to have their say on a blog or article. Some blogging professionals try to solve this problem by allowing anonymous commenting for everyone in the virtual sphere, but this can often make your website a target for spammers and other unwelcome visitors. With Disqus, visitors can easily log in through one of the following six possible credentials: Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo! and Open ID. Giving readers the opportunity to log in through one of these mediums offers tremendous convenience without sacrificing protection against spam.
2. Akismet Spam Filter
Speaking of spam, Disqus’s Akismet spam filter is one of the most advanced systems on the web for protecting your site from the overwhelming effects of spam. It’s especially useful for business blogging, which tends to attract a lot of spam if left unattended. Akismet takes the burden of spam-monitoring off of your shoulders with an automatic system that lets you “set it and forget it.” The service not only conquers spam at an affordable price, but gives your site’s SEO a boost as well by eliminating the debilitating effects that spam can have.
3. Threaded Discussions
Unlike less sophisticated commenting software that only allows one single thread of comments under each post, Disqus allows convenient threaded discussions to foster enriching conversations among interested commenters without inconveniencing readers who may be less interested in a sub-topic in the comment section. Threaded discussion adds more organization to the comment board, which increases its appeal to readers
4. Email Replies
In keeping with the theme of this list, email replies are another way that Disqus enhances convenience for the customer, while encouraging greater interest and more comments. Most readers don’t want to go through the trouble of checking a website regularly for responses to their comments– especially if the website is very popular and will have several pages of comments to scroll through. Both blog-owners and commenters will each get emails when a comment is made on a post. Receivers will be able to respond to comments right through the email, which enhances convenience and promotes discussion by cutting out the effort required by the commenter.
5. Profile Availability
Commenters with Disqus accounts will have a comprehensive profile that allows other users to view their commenting history, including what they’ve been saying and what websites they’ve been visiting. This helps connect like-minded commenters with one another and potentially even facilitate the development of valuable professional relationships. This feature may even offer guest posting opportunities.
These are just five of the many features that come with the Disqus commenting platform that have a primary benefit of generating interest and engaging more commenters. If you feel like you have tried every technique in the book and still haven’t gotten the commenting results you would like, sometimes the answer is simply to make it easier and more appealing for readers to do so. With Disqus, this heightened convenience is achieved in more ways than one.