Apparently many of the smaller businesses are still not keen to become part of the social conversation either owing to lack of initiation or awareness, which is not the right way to manage your online reputation. According to the latest survey on ‘State of Social Conversations’ conducted by Engagio, the most important benefit of online commenting is building and nurturing focused communities that help actively promote your product or services through meaningful lead generation.

Fact1: Replying to any social network message, according to findings of the survey, is more vital than Liking/ Following someone. Online commenting was perceived as among the most dominant social web activities by for 34 percent of respondents. Importance of employing online discussions in different social destinations in percentage terms was as follows: Blogs: 92 percent; social networks: 91 percent; Q&A sites: 79 percent; vertical social networks: 68 percent; photo sharing sites: 54 percent, and location sites: 46 percent.

Fact 2: Revealing the survey respondents’ demographics, it stated that 70 percent make more than at least 7 Comments every week, whereas 86 percent wrote more than 7 replies on networking platforms per week. The age group was equally divided between age 21-39 (49 percent), and between age 40-59 (43 percent).

Fact 3: Among the most desired elements of online commenting systems are spam catching, social sharing and lastly, links to commenter’s profiles. On the other hand, the most irritating aspects of commenting systems are poor quality of comments, inactive authors and delayed moderation. As the survey pointed out, more than 60 percent of users seek out focused online communities of specific interest for discovering conversations, which tend to impact work, lifestyle, travel, or product purchases, and more than 40 percent of them are likely to make purchasing decisions on basis of these visits.

Fact 4: Benefits of proactive commenting on the Web, especially in the social realm, as perceived by the respondents in terms of importance was: fostering and nurturing an online community; adding valuable and dynamic content to the post; promoting healthy discussions; giving ideas for their posts to the authors; letting a business gain recognition or influence; letting commenters influence other readers; fueling advocacy on various topics and issues online, and creating a favorable identity for your brand among the public, thus promoting your product or services.

Fact 5: When asked, how they found the sites they commented on, the most often, the findings were as follows: social media links: 73 percent; known, regular destinations: 51 percent; RSS Readers: 32 percent; discovered during commenting: 23 percent; and e-mail referrals: 21 percent. In terms of importance of Social Gestures in the online realm was commenting: 84 percent; sharing 67 percent; replying to a social networking message/post: 66 percent; following: 57 percent; liking/ voting: 51 percent; bookmarking/ tagging/ favoriting: 40 percent; and pinning content: 24 percent

Fact 6: On being asked, whether they made decisions on purchasing products and associating with brands based on online conversations, almost 45 percent replied in the affirmative, whereas only 15 percent answered in the negative. To sum it up, as the survey pointed out, social media is essentially a self-referring segment, since people are constantly sharing a lot of idea and links there, and in the process, getting in the habit of revisiting known destinations.