What's the Impact of Facebook comments on legal publishers and bloggers?
Early this month Facebook released an update that extends the social network’s reach into the comments sections of third-party websites and blogs. The update is called the Facebook comments plug-in.
How does it work? As you’ve grown accustomed to, at the bottom any blog post or story on a news websites you find the comment box. When the Facebook comments plug-in is deployed by the website or blog publisher, you key your comment into the box and click the post comment button. You’ll then be prompted to log in with Facebook, if you aren’t logged into Facebook already, to post your comment.
Your Facebook member name, photo and other public information, depending on their privacy settings, will be displayed with your comment.
In addition to the comment being posted on the website or blog, you’ll have the option by checking a box, to publish your comment back to Facebook so as to share content with your Facebook friends.
The Facebook comment plugin is taking off reports Matt Rosoff, West Coast Editor of the Silicon Alley Insider.
More than 17,000 sites have implemented the new Facebook Comments plug-in in the two weeks since it launched.
There was some preliminary debate on the comments plugin, as there often is with changes on Facebook.
Was Facebook stifling the authentic voice of the Internet, or helping sites improve the quality of their comments? If sites switched , would their comments section suddenly become a well-maintained garden free of trolls, or a desert wasteland with no action at all?
But it’s hard to argue with what the Facebook comment plug-in does for many website and blog publishers. Per Rosoff:
All this debate over comment quality obscured the bigger reason for sites to use Facebook Comments: it drives referral traffic from one of the most popular and fastest-growing Web sites in the world.
As Facebook points out in a blog post about Comments today, sports blog network SB Nation saw Facebook referrals increase 4x after switching. Examiner.com saw Facebook referrals double. Townsquare Media, which operates sites for radio stations, also got a lot of Facebook referrals, and nearly half of them were new visitors.
What’s the Facebook plugin mean for you as a legal publisher, traditional or blogger? It’s hard to say.
Facebook is obviously not as prevalent in legal dialogue and law firm business development as it is in personal discussion and interaction in the consumer product arena. In addition law blogs don’t draw near as many comments as non-law blogs. The only people more concerned than lawyers about comments on their blogs are the people who may be apt to leave a comment on a law blog.
So the upside of comments on your law blog or legal publication displaying to Facebook friends of your readers may not be that great. You as a legal publisher or blogger are not going to draw the traffic from Facebook that a sports or gadget blog will with the comments plug-in.
Though Facebook is not a game changer today when it comes to legal dialogue and relationship building, Facebook’s impact on the legal profession is growing. Facebook developments, such as the comment plug in-feature, are nothing to dismiss.