Here’s the transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat
Tonight (Jan 26, 2014) we’ll discuss if your blog is still your front porch. Recently, I went back through the archives of The Viral Garden, which was my blog before this one. I started blogging there in 2006, before we all found Twitter or Facebook and years before there was a Google Plus. In 2006 and 2007 if you wanted to share an interesting blog post or article, you didn’t tweet it or post it to Facebook, you shared it on your blog. I did this as well, in fact once a week or so I would post a ‘Viral Community News’ that would have a roundup of 4-5 blog posts that readers of The Viral Garden had wrote that I thought were interesting. It was also a great way to build readership.
But over time, I discovered Twitter, and then Facebook, and my linking behavior changed. I stopped linking on my blog as much, and moved to sharing content via other social media channels and tools. I think most other bloggers have done the same thing, but at the same time, it seems that bloggers are more worried today about building readership. In my opinion, part of the reason why it’s more difficult to build readership is because of that change in linking behavior. Years ago when linking was primarily confined to blogs, that meant traffic bounced back and forth among those blogs. Today, linking has moved off blogs, and additionally a lot of our thoughts that years ago would have been shared as a blog post, are now shared as a Facebook update.
I wanted to talk about this tonight at #Blogchat, and specifically three areas:
1 – Has the way you use your blog changed in the last few years as Twitter and Facebook have become more popular?
2 – Are the things such as linking and content sharing that make social media as a whole more valuable to you, actually making blogging less valuable?
3 – What can we do to make sure that blogging stays the centerpiece of our social media presence? Should it be?
Hope to see y’all tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter! If you are new to #Blogchat you can learn more here.
Pic via Flickr user YellowstoneNPS
Mack, I’ve also been blogging a long time. This is an interesting topic to reflect on.
I will add this: things will never be like they were. There is no going back, only forward.
Hi Becky, you are probably right, the cat is out of the bag at this point.
But the early days of blogging before these other socnets and tools, the communities were much easier to build on blogs. I know Toby Bloomberg has talked repeatedly about how it was so much different for blogs ‘in the old days’.
Will be interesting to discuss, and reminisce 😉
My behaviour definitely changed. Apart from anything else, there was a time I was blogging once or even twice a day.
Other influences have been Tumblr, Posterous, Pinterest etc. I remember listening to Guy Kawasaki at a BlogWorld Expo extolling the relatively newborn Posterous as a bit of a wave of the future, and being delighted that I was such an early adopter that I got my own firstname (short version) for my url there. History! Distraction? Maybe.
Great topic Mack — think we’re going to riff off on this a bit more on #DayChat starting at 8am CENTRAL and running all day.
Yall feel free to come down and join in the conversation.
Cheers
Tom
Yes indeed.. Now that google is looking for more social signals and so many more people are spending the majority of there time learning about things through social media… Seems like nowadays that’s where you need to be as far as driving traffic… The rise in social media almost forces you to spend just as much time developing and relationship build as you do on your own blog