Great Plugin To Increase Comments: BackType Connect


I’ve just added a new Wordpress plugin to my sites that I think will help drive more comments on the site, and also give me more visibility of what readers are saying about my posts on other sites.

The BackType Connect plugin adds comments made on other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and Reddit to your site i.e. conversations occuring about your posts that were previously ‘invisible’ to readers will become visible, allowing readers to read and reply to them. Comment #5 on this post shows this in action.

The plugin was very easy to install and comfigure. The comments are shown inline and even work with threaded blogs. I did change a few of the default options though:

  • ‘Comments summary’ - I turned off as this links to an external page, rather than an internal page
  • ‘Link to more comments’ – I turned this off as currently it links through to the BackType site rather than to the readers blog. I’d rather this worked like the commentluv plugin where users get the link benefit not BackType
  • ‘Ignore retweets’ - I’ve turned this on as I think showing a post has been retweeted is a good thing

The plugin didn’t work well with the Twitter Tools plugin I’m using to add my new posts automatically to my twitter page, and added my tweets to every post. I managed to fix this by adding my twitter profile url to the Wordpress spam moderation filter i.e. http://twitter.com/EvertonBlair

More: BackType Connect


Read Related Posts




Latest Posts

Filed Under: Blogging

Tags:

About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

  • Guys! Don't insert many plugins into your blog. If you do it by force or by mistake, the load time is going to effect everyone.

    I've learned this when I was upgrading my wordpress blog.
    Just be careful...
  • Ah, Nice find Everton! :D
  • Thanks Everton, I understand what it does now! I just twittered with a link to this post so it should show up under freeiphone4me.
  • yep - and there it is ;-)
  • So it is! I like this plugin but can't make it work on my blog - it breaks it every time I install it.
    funnily enough my blog post linking to this thread didn't show up either so something must be conflicting at my end.
  • Have you noticed the problem yet? Your top cpmmenter widget has picked up my twitter ID (freeiphone4me) as the name for every Backtype Connect comment - it uses teh correct url though so at least people are getting the links back!
  • Now I'm more confused - nothing appears to have happened but I linked to you from my blog and my twitter page????
    Also a word of warning - I installed this plugin on my blog using WP 2.7.1 and it corrupted my dashboard. I have had to delete the WP Content folders to fix it.
  • Look at the comment by twsuccess - that was a tweet linking to this post, that got picked up, and then added to this blogs comment thread - make sense?

    Have a look at this post's comments and you'll see how its added the comments left on digg, other blogs and also the tweets
  • I'm not entirely sure I understand this so I;m going to link here from my blog - which gets auto tweeted, to see what happens!!
  • Looks like an awesome tool, thanks
blog comments powered by Disqus