Blogs – Dead or not dead – that isn’t the question
On and off, people claim ‘blogs are dead’ – probably because under the influence of Facebook’s, Tweeter’s and LinkedIn’s dominance in the media, which is often caught in a culture of big numbers, glare and sensation.
But different studies are pointing to blogging being well and alive:
- Blogs are popular: Over Half of All Internet Users Read Blogs According to eMarketer, the number of blog readers in the US will reach 122.6 million in 2011, representing 53.5% of…
Source: http://www.emarketer.com
- Bloggers are fueling the activity in the big 3 social networks: According to this study from yahoo, 1/2 of the tweets are from 0.05% of the twitter community and this small group of heavy user happen to be mostly bloggers.
- Blogs are driving business: Blogs are Two Times More Likely to drive beauty product purchases than magazines. It’s the social effect. On a side note, we have inventoried several thousands beauty blogs and they have millions UVs on aggregate. Such a rule applies to all business.
The true question is “why a blog?”
Because social media is about creating and disseminating information (as in communication). It’s content+community with a high degree of interactions.
Blogs are the perfect social media home base for influencers and brands to create content and peers interactions, as explained by Paula from the Huffington post .
Blogs are humanized media. Media with two ears and one mouth.
I think this is an apples and oranges question. Blogs are repositories of information that attract readers – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are channels that direct people to this information. We need both. That said, I can already see that Google+ takes micro-blogging a step closer to mini-blogging, so let’s revisit this in a few months.
Luke
Agree with you. I didn’t mean to oppose blogs to TFL. There’s room for all and we need them all. When I look at social media, blogs are more on the media side (content), TFL are more on the social side (network).
Laurent
I was just encouraged to see that the hard work bloggers put in to developing their content is paying off in the big-picture. Enjoyed the article, ecairn!