Ok, so the title is a little misleading. Perhaps it should be “why are we still blogging on our own websites”?
We used to blog as a platform to voice an opinion, way before popular social media platforms were established as vehicles get your voice heard.
How It Used To Be
Blogs were a place to put down your thoughts, to gain readers and a way to express yourself via text, images, audio and video. If you were lucky you’d gain regular readers and subscribers, you would comment on similar blog posts out of real interest and there was a sense of community. This was before we had followers or fans, pinners, plus oners and likers.
Social as a blogging platform?
Things have changed, you can build and sustain audiences without even creating and maintaining your own website. Google +, Facebook offer tools to blog as much as you want without even having your own website. The viral nature of these platforms help your content get discovered. So should we be publishing average bog standard bloggy content on our own websites? A blog by definition is web log, so wouldn’t that be better served on a social platform rather than your own website?
Back in August a group of bloggers tried blogging exclusively on Google +, here’s some of their thoughts and feedback.
Stretching ourselves across social media
We’re already stretching ourselves out across as many social platforms as possible building a profile and in reality, micro blogging. Perhaps our time would be better spent increasing the number of blog posts on social and publishing less often but better quality on our own websites?
Flora the explorer tends to write at least a couple of paragraphs per post about her travels on facebook.
But the vast majority are still hammering out as much content as possible on their own sites even if it isn’t actually that interesting or useful, in the hope it’ll boost their unique visitor numbers by adding more content.
Once we didn’t have much of a choice but today we do, so why not save your most amazing content for your website and basic blogging for social? Many bloggers already blog on social on top of publishing articles themselves. Some might argue that more content the better and that it’ll drive traffic via SEO. But what use is that traffic when the article is.. just average? Why not wait to publish an amazing original, useful and ultimately sharable piece on your website? That content is far more likely to drive relevant search traffic and be shared for genuinely being useful or interesting to people. Use the bloggy content to engage your audience on social platforms.
Its not always about quantity but quality that counts, not just for search engines but for users too. Perhaps we should stop measuring unique visitors and start looking at engagement stats such as time on page. Are visitors actually spending much time on your site? Is your content really that engaging?
Ditch the website?
I’m not saying ditch the website entirely, I’m suggesting that bloggers should select their very best work to be published and perhaps those thoughts that are less useful and engaging to be posted on social instead. Once we didn’t have incredible social tools and profile building platforms available to take this approach, but we do now. We should be building our websites into an amazingly unique, useful and engaging resources not one that’s diluted with substandard content.
We should be striving to make our websites exceptional not just bog standard.
