Are your blog post comments scattered?

As bloggers, we try to make use of all the cross-promotional tools we can to try to drive traffic to our blog posts. Particularly with venues like Facebook and Twitter, where people can also comment on what you’ve written, it’s easy for comments about a post to end up scattered across  several different places.

So the question becomes: Is it important to try to gather all the comments into one place for the most complete discussion?

When I first noticed this occurring with some of my posts I had shared on Facebook, I worried that the comments there would not become part of the “record” of the original post.

But I soon realized that it’s beneficial to have a trail back to the original post from several different venues because it gives you more “lines in the water” for reeling in new readers.

That said, I do think you can further manage your scattered comments for the benefit of your blog. Here’s a strategy that will help bring the conversation back to the blog, but still acknowledge and promote the responses on other venues. It will also help you get more “mileage” out of the original post, while contributing something new.

Take a quick look back at the responses you got on Twitter, or Facebook, or wherever, and write a follow-up post about them.

• If any of them asked a particularly good question, answer it in a new post inter-linked back to the original.
• If they were all just “nice post”-type comments, think of something you personally can add to the post and lead into it by saying, “My post on (x) received some very positive feedback over on Twitter, so I wanted to follow up with (xx).”
• Be sure to include your user ID on the other relevant service(s) within your post so blog readers can find/follow you there.

Use this strategy to showcase all the conversations taking place around your blog post.

photo from the Flickr stream of Jungle_boy