A key way to building community on your blog is to cross promote it through other social media outlets, while at the same time making it really easy for your readers to engage in conversations on your blog . Integrating your blog with a Facebook Fan Page, for example, makes your content more accessible to a larger number of people, gives you more opportunities to engage with your audience, and allows your readers to invite more people to participate in conversations that they care about.
Mashable.com has done everyone a favor by highlighting some WordPress plugins that make this kind of integration very easy.
7 Superb Social Plugins for WordPress
The one that really caught my eye though was CommentLuv. Why you ask? Because when it comes to blogs and ministry, content isn’t king – Conversation is. And the CommentLuv plugin looks like it not only helps promote conversation on your blog between you and your readers, but it also helps promote conversations between you and other bloggers.
Another commenting system/plugin to check out is IntenseDebate
www.intensedebate.com
IntenseDebate’s features encourage community by making it easy for your blog’s readers to talk to each other, and more easily keep track of and stay updated on ongoing comment threads. It also makes it really easy for users to share their comments through other social media outlets, such as Twitter, thus promoting your blog to all of their friends in the online social circles that they live in.
