Do You Listen to Your “Silent” Blog Followers?
One of the key elements for being a successful blog writer is having a good understanding as to the exact nature of your readership. Many writers believe that simply relying on comments they receive through their sites, or via social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter is enough to accurately gauge the mood of their audience, unfortunately this isn’t actually the case.
First, let’s agree that your audience is varied and you can’t please everyone – but they all follow your for some reasons (yes, in plural) and trying to understand those reasons is the key.
Your Blog Readership – Layers
One of the great speakers at BlueGlass LA was Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network – I think everyone reading now got it immediately: LOL cats! Now, the most important thing to know about the blogs is they are user-generated – which means the people behind the network managed to build a strong 100%-self-built community – the perfect example of great user engagement and interaction.
So how did they do that?
The answer is simple (no, it’s actually not that simple): understanding how your community is (being) built.
The first law of community you need to know is that it’s not all about “active” users. You need to grow both the commenters and the people who don’t talk. That’s the whole community. Your community is not just the people who generate content: it’s the people who read and use it.
Communities are made of up delicate layers of users: you should listen to ALL of them.
Whilst engaging with these “active” portions of your readership is certainly important, you need to keep in mind that they are (in most cases) the vocal minority. Most of your followers will be people who silently surf through your content, but who will never really feel the need to interact with you as you don’t take the time to actively appeal for them to do so.
Twitter or Facebook isn’t to everyone’s taste (believe it or not) and knee-jerk comments may prove to not be particularly useful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still engage your audience to find out information that you can be used to better understand what kind of content they want you to produce.
A couple of my favorite ways for getting feedback from my readers are:
Setting Up “Personality Tests”
For some reason people just love taking these kinds of quizzes, which makes the ideal for finding out pretty much anything you want about your readership. You will need to adapt the titles of the quizzes to suite the type of blog you are running. On some blogs “What Kind of Computer Are You?” will go down very well, whilst on others you may need something more along the lines of “Which of the Disciples Do You Most Resemble?”.
Making a fun quiz that appeals to your specific target audience can be difficult, but it is vitally important, if you get it right you’ll be amazed just how many normally silent people you can get to participate.
My favorite tool for making these kinds of tests is ProProfs that has a nifty online testing utility, a really simple to use website which lets you make fully interactive quizzes, graphics and all, with very little effort. So for example using the site I set up a quiz labeled “Which Type of Twitter User You Are”, as an attempt to learn more about my audiences tweeting habits, but I did it in such a way so as to appeal to their inquisitive (and competitive) nature regarding where they ranked compared to my other readers.
Tests like these are really simple to set up, not to mention they can be a lot of fun to create, once you’re done you can embed them straight into your website ready for use. Analyzing the results can yield a real goldmine of information. The Quiz School stats pages give a complete overview of how each individual answered each specific question, as well as charts documenting the overall voting amongst all those who responded.
Below are the result analytics I got from my quiz maker – plenty of data to dig into. Here’s the report itself (notice that you can actually see the user names, details and result):
And here are some visualization tools to allow you to analyze the data better (for example, you can see the answer break-down for each particular question):
Using Survey’s
Survey’s often provide a most useful forms of customer feedback, especially ones which allow for users to leave their own comments regarding specific questions. Unfortunately long survey’s can be a lot more difficult to get people to fill in when compared to short quizzes which appeal to their sense of fun.
If you think you can entice enough of your users to fill in a Survey as to make it worthwhile, there are a couple of options available to you. Firstly you could use a third party website like Survey Monkey to set up and track the results of your survey. Alternatively if you are using Wordpress to run your blog then you could use a simple Wordpress plugin to do the job for you. The second option giving the advantage of maintaining full control of the survey through the back end of your site, as well as complete privacy when it comes to the information compiled.
Do you use any tools to get to know your blog readers better? Please share them in the comments!
Ann Smarty is a strong believer in guest posting. If you love or plan on guest blogging, join Ann’s community of guest bloggers: My Blog Guest, which is basically a forum where people meet to exchange, post, and promote each other’s content. Ann’s newest project MyBlogGuest Tracker is an affordable and usable link monitoring solution.
Great idea, Ann! It sounds a little bit difficult to balance the fun questions with the information you need and writing the results, but certainly worth the effort.
Thanks for the comment, Natalia. Yes, it may take you some time to brainstorm the engaging concept and questions – but the outcome is well worth it. You can use quizzes to find content inspiration as well!
Great post Ann. Since my blog is still quite new, it’s hard for me to know where things are going at times. I think this could be really useful. And I absolutely love quizes!
I recently started using a Wordpress poll plug-in that asks my readers a simple question regarding my niche. With their answers I can discover what my readers are into and can write more blog posts about that specific topic in order to pique those specific readers’ interest.
With the concept of longer surveys, used for finding out reader demographics, from my experience of taking surveys like that, they are more likely to be answered if there is some form of incentive attached to its completion.