Article first published as The Blog is Alive and Well on Technorati.
If you ask me, the last two lines of “An empire gives way” an article in the June 24th issue of The Economist, about the state of the blogosphere, sounds ominous. The piece cites research from media-research firm, Nielsen, on how traffic to blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, are stagnating and how by contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Okay, I get it–but to be honest– I was alarmed by the article’s projection: “Where will that end? Perhaps in a single, hugely long blog posting about the death of blogs.”
Can Facebook, Twitter and blogs play nicely together? Can they co-exist without one sending the other to their Internet grave? I think so. I think the forms compliment one another and feed off of each other very well.
Blogger, Cory Doctorow, writes, “I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I’ve done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn’t be a good fit for the blog – material I just wouldn’t have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.”
I share links to material I find valuable on Facebook and use the comment field to make a brief point or to ask a question and initiate a discussion. On Twitter, I often re-tweet when I’m reading an article on a blog or online newspaper. It’s a quick way to say to Twitter followers, here’s something I think you’ll like. But when it comes to covering a topic in more detail, there’s still nothing in my opinion that beats the blog post.
The blog post is where the writer gets to share their perspective. For a business blog it offers companies a way to focus on topics their customers care about thereby providing a direct benefit. How it works: let’s say a person learns something from what you’ve written, you interested them enough to continue to explore the topic by clicking on a link for additional resources, they take the time to comment, maybe even tell you about a report they’ve read with new findings, or a book just released– this is social-sharing at its best.
Face it, social media channels suit some people and business better than others. Figuring out where your clients are most likely going to find you and follow you is half the battle. Engaging them in meaningful content is where it makes the difference. If a blog isn’t right for your business, that’s okay. Read others, comment on them, and by all means share the links. There’s still a lot of life left in blogs!
