During the Mashable Meetup at LIBA (Loyola Institute of Business Administration) got an opportunity to talk about the Relevance of Blogging.
Are blogs still relevant in the days of twitter, facebook, foursquare and the likes? This was the main agenda of the talk and I also touched upon my experience as Official Blogger for Tata Nano Superdrive and Corporate Blogging in general.
When I asked the audience if they thought whether or not blogging is still relevant, more than 50% of the audience stated that they think blogging is still relevant. Only one gentleman said its not relevant anymore as people have no time to write lengthy blog posts and are moving to twitter and facebook. Rest of the audience were in Don’t know/Can’t say mode.
In my talk I shared an opinion that blogging is still relevant, based on following observations:
Blogging is getting accepted at par with media. Most of the companies and PR agencies have started to invite bloggers for their press meets, product launches or events.
For twitter, facebook and foursquare, you’re its inventory and not customer. Every minute you spend (or waste) on facebook, facebook makes money. Blogging platform in turn gives you complete control over the content, design and monetization.
Facebook updates are not searchable by search engines and twitter updates seldom appear in search results. Blogs continue to derive good volume of traffic from search engines
Twitter and FB has very short attention span. Unless an update goes viral (through retweets etc) its easily lost in the flood of new updates on your timeline.
Few years ago blogging was a fashion and everyone jumped into the bandwagon. At present, I feel not so serious players have moved away from blogging (to twitter n FB) while serious writers continue to run their blogs as effectively as earlier. All popular bloggers are also active on twitter and fb and are using these platforms effectively to promote their blogs. Building an effective blog takes time and efforts but pays off well in long run.
Companies continue to invest in their corporate blogs
F5ive Technologies