Like a boxer that refuses to go down, blogs keep bouncing back even as new social media services such as Pinterest capture the spotlight.
A recent report by NielsenWire, which I somehow missed when it initially appear, suggested there were 173 million blog as of last October, compared with 35.7 million in October, 2006.
So, who’s doing all this blogging? Nielsen discovered the following:
- Women make up the majority of bloggers, and half of bloggers are aged 18-34
- Bloggers are well-educated: seven out of 10 went to college, a majority of whom are graduates
- About 1 in 3 bloggers are moms, and 52% of bloggers are parents with children under 18 years-old.
- Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on video sites such as YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in message and forums.
So why are blogs so resilient and, arguably, coming back into favour? One of the biggest reasons may be the growing enthusiasm about content marketing. Blogs are a perfect fit for content marketing because they power original content that sits on a company’s Website, and they can be used to achieve multiple goals and reach a variety of audiences.
In other words, blogs are the work horses of social media.
They may not be particularly sexy or have great curb appeal but they get the job done for companies willing to make a sustained effort to provide some kind of value – be it educational, entertaining and engaging content.
For companies, these should be appealing reasons to have a blog to complement their other social media, marketing and sales activities.
So, why doesn’t every company have a blog?
For one, they are hard to do. It takes time, effort, creativity and resources to produce good blog content, which is easier said than done. Blogs aren’t something you can quickly whip off in 140 characters…or less.
Another thing about blog is there isn’t instant gratification. Sure, comments are great but they can be more difficult to get than a retweet or “Like”. For anyone looking for an easy win, blogs can be frustrating because of the work involved to make them happen.
The upside is blogs can deliver a variety of benefits and dividends depending on what you want to get out of them. Perhaps the most important given the focus on content marketing is blogs can generate content that can be repurposed for lots of different things.
The question about the role of social media in politics has been asked many times (even on occasion by this blog). It is a very important question, and with every election we inch closer to an answer.
While I’ve never read the books and I haven’t seen the movie yet, I still feel like I know almost everything about The Hunger Games from just listening to people talk about it. People seem to go nuts for The Hunger Games. It’s breaking box office records. It’s also causing quite a stir in the social media world. Today, I decided to take a look at just what kind of a stir it’s producing.
Social media is still the belle of the ball even as it becomes more mainstream and seen as table stakes.
Facebook and Google, the two digital behemoths, just can’t seem to get along.
It’s that time of year again. March means that basketball fans come out in droves to watch the best of the best at the college level in what is appropriately known as March Madness. For almost a month the NCAA basketball teams have been battling it out in the tournament and now we’re down to the final four. Saturday night we’ll see University of Kentucky play University of Louisville and Ohio State University face off against University of Kansas. The winner of these two games will face each other for the title of champion. But who’s it going to be?
“Google+ is a really interesting, cost-effective platform because you can mirror Facebook content” – a PR executive’s interesting take.
The beautiful thing about social media is anyone can take advantage of it, and great ideas can come to life with some innovative spirit..
Twitter, an integral part of many people’s digital lives just celebrated its sixth birthday. Putting aside the weirdness of marking the birthday of a Web service, it does give plenty of reason to think about Twitter’s status as a business and global communications workhorse.
