The Future of Blogs
Blog Use & Purpose Now
Blogs used to really popular for people who wanted to have an online diary, to express their thoughts on different things. However, the Pew Research Centre found that blogging has decreased by half from 2006 to 2009 among children ages 12 to 17. This is reasonable since blogging was first introduced before their age. In that age group, they are known to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. However, even between the ages 18 to 33, which is the age group who experience the creation of blogs, blogging has also dropped 2 percent from 2008. The purpose of blogs have evolved in the past few years. Bloggers now have a general theme to their blogs, whether its technology related, beauty related or job related. A lot of bloggers have moved to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter because they find these sites more useful and they can reduce the time spent on it. As the society is improving, each person is busier with many responsibilities on their hands, writing blogs may not be as ideal anymore. Rather, when they feel they want to express a thought really quick, they can turn to sites like Facebook and Twitter. By doing so, others are updated with what they are doing quickly, rather than reading a really long blog.
Blog & Marketing
Blogs are now commonly found among companies as a marketing tool. Companies would write blogs to update and inform customers about their company. Many companies also ask their employees to write blogs to increase brand awareness and search engine optimization (To read more about Search engine optimization, please visit my earlier blog post). For example, companies would have a blog post when they have a new collection in stock or when they have a huge sale going on.
Tumblr – A New Kind of Blog
With this evolution also foster the creation of sites like Tumblr. Instead of having paragraphs in a blog post, Tumblr’s blog posts are usually a picture or a video with a caption or thought below it. Below are some examples of Tumblr blogs.
Source: stfumarrieds.tumblr.com
Source: all-thats-interesting.tumblr.com
source: pbh3.tumblr.com
Who else is Blogging?
Although blogging is decreasing among teens and young adults, there is increasing use among adults ages 34-73. Bloggers among this age group are more educated and knowledgeable and therefore their blog posts are filled with more intellectual and informational content.
Online Marketing
Marketers have to understand their target audience first before determining which online (social media) channel to use. Although some companies may want to have presence in all the online channels, this is not ideal as it is time consuming and more costly. Each online channel requires human resources to maintain and monitor it. If the companies don’t research about which channel their target audience is using the most, they are wasting their resources and won’t get great results. So if the company’s target audience are adults between ages 34-73, then marketers should invest in producing more intellectual blog post content to attract them. On the other hand, if the company is targeting a younger audience, then they should focus on social media channels to increase their brand awareness.
Source: New York Times
