A recent trend in the blogosphere has been to add tweets as comments on posts. I understand where this comes from, as in general commenting on blog posts has decreased in favour of twittering. By adding all tweets mentioning your blog posts, your posts look more alive and will probably attract more readers.
Whenever I think about features for my blogs, I always ask myself what the value is for my readers. In the case of tweets as comments, I look for the answer based on my own experiences. It happens frequently that I find an interesting post with let’s say 20 comments. When I finished reading this, otherwise interesting, blog post and get ready for participating in the conversation, I find out that there actually are only two real comments, followed by a tweet of the author and 17 retweets adding absolutely nothing to the post or the conversation. Immediately my motivation to participate in the conversation is gone and I quickly move on to the next blog.
Although in theory tweets are comments about your posts (or at least mentioning the post), they hardly ever contribute to the discussion. If you absolutely want to display the tweets on your blog post, go ahead, but don’t mix them with the comments. If in the example above the tweets would have been separated from the comments and the blogs metadata would have shown me that the post has 2 comments and 18 tweets, I would not be so disappointed and probably would have left a comment as well.
A comment is a comment and a tweet is a tweet.
