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Is Blogging Threatened By Social Media?

Marketing Pilgrim has a post commenting on a recent story from the New York Times regarding the death of blogging due to social media.  The post on Marketing Pilgrim basically rubishes the whole notion that blogging may be threatened by social media, and while I agree with some of the posts sentiments, to a certain extent I hope there’s some truth in the New York Times article.

One of the concerns that many SEO professionals have is the unending number of rather meaningless blogs that currently clog search results, particularly Google search results. Blogger blogs run into their millions now, with a great majority of them blogs that were started on a whim, had a dozen or so posts published, then abandoned. The number of abandoned blogs the world over would number in their millions, all still being indexed and, at times, still appearing in search results.

If 12-17 year olds, the data used by the New York Times, are starting to walk away from blogging, then I cannot see where that is going to harm the Internet, or harm professional blogs. The Marketing Pilgrim post makes an interesting observation:

As people grow and mature in how they think, the inevitable happens which is that you cannot usually get a point across or make an argument or defend a position in 140 characters or less. Even Facebook has limits.

This is the crux of the argument. Yes, younger people are leaving blogging behind. That’s good news in the long run for marketers that use blogs. Over time, as our youth mature, they will turn to blogging if they need to – and that is the important fact. Rather than an Internet full of uninspired blogs, we may see that blogging takes on a more mature and more serious note. In my mind, that’s for the better, not for the worse.

Of course, while people may turn less to blogging to tell their life story, that doesn’t mean they won’t visit a blog to find information they are looking for. Of course, the New York Times article doesn’t really address that particular issue. For professionals that use blogs for marketing and SEO purposes, blogging is far from dead – with luck, there may just be a fraction less competition in the blogosphere.