Blogging // Community Interaction

One of my favorite things about blogging is the sense of community that it encourages. It’s crazy, but I’ve met some of the kindest, most creative, most encouraging people ever because of this career. And especially lately, as you lovelies are becoming a little more vocal, I find myself so thankful for the Lovely Indeed community in particular. Your comments and your interactions on social media are so gracious, funny, and real. And I love it.

The idea of community interaction is something that I’ve been trying to improve on lately. For a long while in the beginning, I was blogging to almost absolute silence, because I didn’t really have many readers to speak of (except for my ever lovin’ mom). And then when people started leaving comments, I obviously enjoyed it but I never occurred to me to actually turn it into a conversation! Duh. So that’s where I am now, doing my best to facilitate conversation and share with everybody.

The idea of comments on a blog is kind of tricky. As bloggers, we all want to engage our readers and get people chatting. But sometimes I look at the really huge bloggers with hundreds of comments on a post, and I have no idea how they sort through them all. I suppose at a certain point, it’s just plain impossible to reply to every message. Add to that the tweets, Facebook messages, Instagram comments, and emails, and you could start to spend all day just replying to all of the correspondence.

So how do you manage it all? For myself, I’ve started a sort of priority list when it comes to responding to all the fine folks that reach out. A personal email always gets a response, even if it’s a quick one. Same goes for comments that include a question, unless it’s already been answered in the post or in another comment. Next up is general blog comments. After that, I hit social media. My Twitter and Instagram tend to be the most active, so I’m trying to improve my response time there. Finally, Facebook is kind of sleepy for me but I try to at least “Like” any interactions there to acknowledge that they happened.

So what about you? Do you find yourself getting bogged down in responding? Or do you have a different system? If you’re a blogger, I’d love to know your thoughts on the whole thing! And on a related note, just another heartfelt thanks to you all for sharing while you’re hanging out here. It truly makes my day to hear from you. xoxo