In the land of Tweets, do Blogs and Articles Still Matter?
Read any magazine, watch any news stories or attend any industry trade conference, and it would seem that everyone these days is focused intently on Twitter and reaching the world via Tweets. In our travels around the globe talking to marketing professionals, we certainly field lots of questions about these rapidly growing social media platforms and how they can best be used within marketing to reach audiences, find influencers and ultimately drive successful marketing efforts.
So to hear all of this buzz about Twitter, it leads one to ask in this “new” world of media, do blogs and articles still matter? Is it just as important to find the voices talking there as is to find those tweeting on Twitter? Or are blogs so “2009” and no longer where smart people turn for information, thought leadership or even just good reading?
At mBLAST, we believe blogs matter – a lot – if for no other reason than blogs have a far greater chance of reaching your market and the mass market than Twitter does today.
The latest numbers from Hubspot and Pew Research show that about 79 percent of all Americans use the Internet. Of this online population, only about 13 percent is on Twitter, and a quarter of these accounts have no followers (and thus have NO real voice in the market). When you further reduce these numbers down to voices using Twitter at least once per day, you end up with about 4 percent of the total US online population tweeting.
In contrast, 65 percent of all global Internet users read blogs, according to Hubspot. And of these people, 32 percent read blogs once a day, and 46 percent of daily readers visit blogs more than once a day.
To compare these numbers, let’s look at just the U.S. online population of about 164M users. As shown in the attached graphic, 7 million of all U.S. online adults access Twitter at least once per day, while 128 million read blogs at least once per day.
When we compare these numbers, we can quickly see that blogs have far greater potential reach than tweets today. So unless you have a target market community that is 100 percent on Twitter, and really not listening to any other medium, finding blogs and bloggers who can help carry your message into the market may have far greater impact on your marketing efforts than Twitter can.
At mBLAST, we get this. And this is exactly why we built our mPACT platform to not only index tweets as they happen, but also blogs, articles and other forms of more “traditional” media.
We believe to really uncover relevant voices, it’s important to cast the net as widely as possible in order to find the voices talking about the things that are topically relevant to the market segment or community you seek to address, no matter what medium is carrying those voices. Once we’ve found the voices, we then keyword index every piece of content we gather – including blogs – so users can search in My mPACT and mPACT Pro to find these voices using the keywords their market requires. Only when you find all relevant voices can you compare and rank their relative influence. It’s not where someone speaks that matters; it’s what they say, who is listening, and what effect the voice has on those listeners.
Blogs still matter – a lot. And we think tweets will continue to offer links to “long form” pieces of content like articles and blogs where passionate voices can really espouse their points of view without the constraints of 140 characters.
To find influential bloggers (and journalists, Twitter users, etc.), check out My mPACT which helps you find how influential your voice is against others’ on blogs, tweets and other forms of media. And try mPACT Pro to dig deeper into the blogsphere and other media to find the voices having the greatest impact on your market and your competitors.
