Blogging Declines Among Corporations in Favor of Social Media
A new study has found that more companies are forgoing blogging in favor of engaging with customers through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has studied the social media habits of seven of the top 25, and 28 of the top 100 companies from the 2011 Inc. 500 list.
Its latest report has revealed that blogging has declined for the first time among Inc 500 companies. Only 37 percent of those studied use a blog in their marketing efforts, compared to 91 percent that use social media.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most popular platform among the group with 74 percent using it. The social network narrowly beat out LinkedIn, which is used by 73 percent. Twitter rounds out the top three with 64 percent.
Ninety percent of Inc. 500 companies believe social media is important for brand awareness and reputation management, 88 percent use these tools for generating web traffic, and 81 percent rely on it for lead generation.
While 92 percent of those polled admitted to finding blogging successful, the use of blogs has dropped to 37 percent from 50 percent in 2010. Fortune 500 company blogs are also on the low side at 23 percent.
Social media is evolving and more marketers are turning to it to help with company goals. However, while interest is high, we don’t recommend that you ditch your blog and focus entirely on social platforms. Rather, it’s worth re-evaluating your goals and determining how these tools — blogs included — can help you achieve them.
[Via: AllTwitter, Image credit: Panasonic]
With resources being tight, I think companies are looking at using social media more than blogging, which I think is fine, but there's still a place for blogging. I would suggest blogging as a way of showing off expertise in any given subject areas. Way too many bloggers are under the mistaken impression that the key to blogging success is writing at least one article every day. And while there is some merit to that, if your core business isn't blogging you're going to be wasting time trying to come up with 500+ words for a new article every day and going to produce lower-quality content. That's where companies would get discouraged with blogging if they think they have to write something new every day...motivation goes down and quality suffers. I think the better approach is to focus on writing a very professional article once in a while that demonstrates true expertise in any given niche. You can do that once every few weeks or months and focus on your core business most of the time. To supplement that, I would recommend using your normal Facebook or Twitter account that most people are logged in most of the time anyway and writing short observations whenever the mood strikes. And its not hard to post on these networks because the vast majority of people are on there everyday anyway. Over time, by promoting yourself on your website, through Facebook ads, through the types of services at http://www.popularfans.com for example, and through other methods, you can build up a nice little dedicated niche over time without going to the extreme and trying to keep an actual blog active, which involves a surprising amount of time to handle and you get the best of both worlds. Besides, with so many people essentially using Facebook and Twitter as their RSS feeds nowadays, I think that this type of strategy has quite a few additional merits. A handful of great articles is much better to have than a lot of average content. I think many businesses that are currently trying to blog nearly every day would be better off following the aforementioned approach.
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