Building a sense of community and engagement with your blog’s audience can be one of the most difficult aspects of successful blogging. Why? Because most bloggers miss opportunities for connecting and engaging with their readers on their terms. In some cases many are overwhelmed with all the strategies and tactics necessary to run a successful blog. Even if you’re a large company, blogging is taxing and time-consuming. All the more reason to be smart about how you build community and how you engage that community for continuing growth of your blog.
photo credit: Chris Isherwood
One way to increase your blog’s community and, in turn, increase your reach beyond the walls of your blog is to build a bridge between your blog and key social media sites where your audience is. Meaning, add features on your blog, that tie directly to other social media properties (think Facebook, Twitter, Etc). You’ll not only make it much easier for your audience to share you to the outside world of those sites, but you can also give them an easy way to tie your blog with their other online activities — and with others who are tying the two together.
I believe, right now, the key sites to focus on — depending on your blog, audience, and niche (and that’s a judgment call you’ll have to make for you) — would be Facebook, Twitter, and Google Friend Connect. All three are formidable, targeted traffic drivers and all three have social media components that can help you leverage the power of those external communities to build a sense of community for your blog.
I’ll discuss these social media sites in order of my preference/favorites…
Why? Because I can.
Google Friend Connect for Your Blog
I absolutely love the possibilities Google Friend Connect has brought to the table for building communityon any blog or website. As a whole, the new Google Friend Connect tools have so much potential, especially down the road as more blogs/websites start to see the power these tools really offer.
Adoption of GFC’s tools is growing and, I believe, will continue to grow. Now, whether the masses are adopting is questionable… most of GFC’s active users are early adopters and those that are somewhat familiar with the online environment, or users of other Google tools (GMail, Google Calendar, Etc). But, still it’s not mainstream, so before you go through the trouble of adding things, match it up to your audience and your goals (as with EVERY thing you do online).
Google Friend Connect’s Social Bar
A pretty snazzy feature that allows you to have a GFC social bar on the top or bottom of your blog pages. One great thing about this feature is you can have all the coolness of GFC on your blog, including commenting, without altering your design template and finding space on your sidebar. One drawback, again, is that bars and hovering items may be annoying to your audience. On the flip side, they tend to get more action if your audience does value it. Really the only way to know for sure is to test it.
Google Friend Connect’s Comments Gadget
The comments gadget is a great way to integrate comments throughout your blog, outside of the commenting system that is built into your blog. Commenters can leave general comments, share links and even share videos. One caution, as we tested this on new sites, we learned that many will find this to be an opportunityfor self-promotion. It’s okay, you can moderat the comments just like you do on your blog. As shown above, you can even customize it to fit any design that your blog has, then you simply cut-n-paste the code generated where you want it and your done.
Google Friend Connect’s Rate and Review Gadget
Another cool gadget from GFC. You can set it so peeps can rate and review your site as a whole or individual posts and pages. Ratings and reviews can encourage engagement, because you’re showing the value of community opinion. Not only that, you can get really good feedback that can help you become a better blogger for your readers, which is always a good thing. Now, I wouldn’t go crazy with having comment gadgets and rating gadgets all over your site, choose based on your goals and your audience.
Google Friend Connects Event Gadget
I like this gadget. First off, you can include images and full details of the event, as well as letting people add it to their Google Calendar with a simple click. It’s also a great way to enforce “social proof” if people mark they are attending in large numbers. This gadget is easy to include on posts where your promoting an event and even in HTML boxes on Facebook 
Google Friend Connect’s Recommendation Gadget
This is another great way to get the community to feed posts to other community members. First, it allows your readers to give a thumbs up on individual posts, pages, and the blog as a whole. When they make that recommendation, it automatically tallies all recommendations and you can show them in a nifty little sidebar widget — kind of like a most popular posts widget. In addition, they share it with all their other connections too.
Google Friend Connect’s Polls and Get Answers
Both of these are great features that can add real value to you as a blogger, because you’re asking your readers directly about what they think, feel, like, etc. I’m particularly fond of the Get Answers gadget because it not only let’s you know what is on the mind of your readers, but also let’s others within the GFC community on your blog answer those questions as well.
Facebook Connect
Facebook is obviously, for the most part, a social media site you want to pay attention to. I say for the most part, because many bloggers and marketers automatically assume you have to be there out of the shear numbers they are pulling in.
This isn’t necessarily true — you always want to pay attention to your goals, but also whether how your audience is participating on a site relates to you engaging with them. But, that’s an entirely different post.
If you’re convinced your readers are on Facebook, you’ll want to integrate Facebook Connect into your blog, so that people can use their FB identity to login to your blog for commenting and also sharing with their connections.
Facebook Connect isn’t the easiest of the social media features to integrate. Simply check out their own instructions and you’ll see why. However, there are some cool plugins that make it much easier to add to a Wordpress blog:
- WP-FBConnect Plugin for Wordpress: I haven’t tested this one, but it has all the features you’ll need to have FB Connect linked to your commenting system and adds a widget like the other plugins.
- Facebook Connect Plugin by Sociable: I’ve tested this one and currently run it on over 30 client blogs. It’s super easy to integrate, adds cool commenting and widget features. Plus, it looks better to me than the others.C
- Community Facebook Connect Plugin: I actually attempted to install this on several client blogs, but could never get it to work. I’m a LAMP programmer who can build serious applications from the ground-up, if I can’t figure it out how to work out the kinks, I don’t even bother. But, it’s here for completeness of the list.
- Gigya’s Socialize FB Connect Plugin: I haven’t tested or attempted this one… So you’re on your own with this one.
And, if you have the Disqus comment system (which I don’t recommend and you can see more about that here), you can also use the Disqus FB Connect tool they provide to integrate FB Connect into your Disqus comments.
Twitter Integration and Tools
Twitter is one of the few sites, I consider to be important for all bloggers. First off, it’s pretty massive with the amount of users and business adopting it for many reasons. Second, Twitter provides real-time information that is searched by the minute all across the globe. So, you may not need to use Twitter to reach your audience directly, but you will indirectly reach them with the visibility Twitter can give you with industry influencers, blogging heavy-weights, the media and more.
There are a gazillion and one ways to integrate Twitter into your blog, these are my faves that I’ve actually worked with and recommend depending on your goals:
- Sign In With Twitter API: This is the general code that developers or bloggers with access to developers can use to build their applications. At some point, I’d expect more tools to be added to their list, as well.
- Twitter Tools Plugin: Great, super easy plugin that allows you to show Twitter updates, create Tweet digest posts and a host of other features that are fully customizable. It’s the easiest to use by far.
- TweetSuite Plugin: A great tool that helps you integrate tweetbacks (the listing of all tweets sharing link to your posts), adds a retweet this button, and much more.
- TweetThis Plugin: A super simple, easy way to add a Tweet This button to your blog. Simple and effective.
These are just a few of the MANY options available… We’re actually working on a massive list that will highlight in detail, by function, all Twitter plugins for Wordpress. But you get the idea.
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My advice with all these options and the many more you’ll find online is to keep it simple. Simplicity helps you focus your community building and also helps your readers focus on what matters most… your content and expertise.
Looking forward to connecting with you!
Maria 
P.S. Don’t forget to leave a comment and share your faves!
This is the second part of a 5 part series on how to build a sense of community on your blog.
Part 1: Building Blog Community with Comment Features
Part 3: Building Blog Community with Social Sharing Features
About the Author...
Maria Reyes-McDavis is a colossal geek brainiac, certified genius IQ with university degrees in Finance, Economics, Business Management and an MBA. Maria has served over 300 pro-level, digital marketing clients as founder of online marketing firm Digital Peas & Carrots. Maria is Founder and Editor of Hyphenated Americans, a conservative politics blog and Proverbs 31 Project an online women's ministry. Most importantly, Maria is a wife to her king, mother of 3, lover of basketball (Go Lakers & Clippers!), classic cars and is currently training for professional women's roller derby!
