Who Leaves Comments Online and Why?

Something we aim to do with every guest post we publish is to spark conversation.  By conversation, we mean comments & social media shares. 

The more engagement a blog post gets, the more reach it gets and exposure for our clients.

So, examining why people share.

And why people leave comments & how we can spark more of them is important. 

In this post, we are going to examine the types of people who leave comments & their motivation for leaving comments too.

Different Types Of Commentators

Type 1: The link spam

As in everything in life, all commentators were not created equal. Every week I delete spam comments from this blog, the type of comments that say nothing but have “Dental Clinic London” written into the comment name. 

Obviously, these are the types of comments that do not add value to your blog and are only written for SEO purposes.   I’d suggest you delete these ASAP and don’t encourage comment spam practices.


Type 2: The legit 

The golden grail of commenter, this person is either someone in your community who regular leaves comments and comes back and reads your content.  

Or, it’s someone who is new to your community who is interested in the article content and has some value to add to the discussion.

This study of over 8500 commentators shows the number 1 reason people leave comments is when they know something about the subject of the article that wasn’t in the article.  

Why not ask readers if they have a valuable tip to share at the end of your post?  Encourage that kind of engagement & start to see your interaction grow.


Type 3: The partner

There are lots of blogging communities you can join in order to post your latest content in order to receive promotion and comments from other bloggers. 

This can be a beneficial tactic to kick-start the virality of your post. Once you have a couple of comments, when you promote the post to a wider net of people, they will be more likely to add their opinion as well.  

Everyone knows that the more engagement you get on a post, the more you are likely to receive.  

The motivation for this person is that they will also receive comments and promotion from the community on their articles.  So, whilst beneficial to kick start a post, it is also important to ensure you get organic comments from an audience interested in what you have to say as well. 


Type 4: The Troll

We all know this person.  For some reason, they have decided that stirring things up online is important to them.  

Credit for image American Scientist

This is the kind of person who cares more about how many reply comments they trigger, then learning more on the topic or engaging in a conversation.   

Really, they just want to start an online fight.  This post highlights a couple of motivations for trolling, one of them being, the bad mood the person is in.  The internet provides a safe haven for many to take out their aggression and anger online.  

The best way to deal with these types of comments is to delete, and if you can block them from your community or blog.

That's a wrap for this post! 

We’d love to know, can you identify another type of commentator? Is there a type we have missed?