Our friends at Social Media Influence posed a provocative question this week – Doesn’t anybody blog any more? As you can see, the answer is “yes”. But there’s a “but”.
Some 26 million blogs (including this one) were started last year. That looks like a whole lot of blogging, but here’s the “but” – it’s not a lot compared with the massive growth in other areas of social media.
Those smart folk at SMI used data from Royal Pingdom and their own research to produce a chart showing the growth in various online and social activity in 2009 and 2010. We reproduce it here with permission:
SMI’s analysts highlight that, although blogging is still on the increase, the real growth is famously in Twitter and Facebook, where numbers continue to boom.
Why might that be? Well, despite what you may think having read them, it takes us significantly longer to produce a blog post – even a quickie like this – than it does to update our Twitter feed or Facebook wall. Yet those posts may reach more people.
So in terms of time vs engagement, Twitter and Facebook look like better investments than old-school blogging. But, of course, they have their limitations (140 characters sound famiiar?) while blogs enable a more discursive approach.
We reckon blogs will remain an important part of the social media scene for some time yet.
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