Sure, your company blog (or blogs) is an important resource for sharing company information, building expertise, enhancing search engine optimization and more. But new developments this year might start chipping away at least one of your blog’s roles.
A curious thing happened this last April, all sorts of blogs saw a significant decrease in traffic. In some cases, traffic fell off for 60 days or so and quickly recovered. However, some blogs, like the Realtor mainstay ActiveRain, experienced crushing declines that have left traffic relatively flat for the year. What does this mean for blogs as a whole? According to Forrester Research, people don’t trust your blog. But even so, we think there’s another, more structural factor at play.
Take a look at this ActiveRain traffic estimate from Quantcast. You can see the erratic pattern take a nosedive in early Spring.
Likewise, see how traffic to blogs hosted by Blogger plummeted around the same time. Traffic eventually recovered, but what caused the massive decline in visits?
Now, let’s look at Social Media’s darling Facebook’s traffic estimate from the same period. Jeepers, April was the start of a very good year for Mr. Zuckerberg, wasn’t it?
Does this signal the beginning of the blog swan song? The Big Scary Cranium has thought about it and our answer is a resounding, “nah.” There’s still plenty of future for company blogs, but it’s role is an ever changing one. Blogs gained in popularity because they allowed people to release and digest information faster than traditional media could. Today, Facebook and Twitter enable these same people to share information even more quickly. So, while blogs may become less attractive as sources for breaking news, they remain important centers of knowledge sharing and expertise building.
Many of ActiveRain’s blogs are based on sharing newsworthy events in the Real Estate industry. We’re willing to bet that a careful study of blogs hosted by ActiveRain would reveal the more influential “expert” blogs suffered less dramatic traffic declines than those based on aggregating or commenting on industry news.
So, keep showing the world how smart you are though your blog, save the breaking news for your social profiles. What do you think? Did Facebook kill the blog star in April?
