Has Facebook killed Blogging? Is facebook next?

Has Facebook killed Blogging

How do I get people to visit my blog? Is it a question of topic, SEO, a sign of the times or something else - I am not sure? But if content is king, then traffic is Queen as many say and it seems atleast to me, that traffic is lacking. The current rave is facebook and twitter, which believe it or not, are basically what you would call micro blogging. Instead of having a 200 plus word blog you have 140 characters to make a statement. Ofcourse facebook has started giving you more in order to make larger messages but still – its small messages that are posted.

The problem with facebook and twitter is – there truly is no interaction. Most facebook wall [ home page ] is filled with the users status or that of their friends. I have notice that very little communicating is actually done on these ports. Most status comments are usually meet with a click of a like button, the occasional “LOL” or no response at all. If you call posting when you went shopping and someone clicking the like button as communication, that is.

When facebook first came out and twitter as well, it was touted as a portal for people to communicate, to share, to inform others of their feelings, where about's and “staying connected”. Ofcourse most people do not do that, as I see it – they speak into the empty void and are satisfied with believing that someone is reading it – even if they never get a response. I have a niece who has resorted to posting strange responses, things like: “It’s not that I hate you, because I hate you”. I believe she does it just to see if she can rile up a response from those FB friends. I also have a FB friend who does nothing but post what she “likes” online: “oh, check this out” and never responds to any of my comments or response anyone sends her.

I have a family member who only responds to tell me that he believes I am spamming him – excuse me, I have a blog because I want people to read what I write, the same as FB people want others to read their post. If I send you an email, a tweet, a FB comment or any kind of invitation to read one of my blog post, it’s not spam; it’s only me trying to get people to read my post, my thoughts, my opinion, my story and would like people to respond to said thoughts.

Which brings me to this thought: Is blogging dead?

Has blogging died? Has it been done in by the likes of face book, twitter, myspace, digg, and other such social sites? Sites where the only thing that passes as a conversation is how many people click some form of like button or voting button?
Even fortune five hundred companies have started shutting down their blogs and opening facebook accounts, twitter accounts and the like. What has happened to change the order of things? People use to tell me that texting was the death of communication for the next generation of kids. Apparently Facebook with its wide popularity is affecting all generations.

Businessegrow.com wrote:
“ For the first time in the five years that this research has been conducted, the use of blogging declined. Blogging had been steadily climbing as a corporate communications tool — 19% of the INC 500 blogged in 2007, 39% in 2008, 45% in 2009, 50% in 2010 and just 37% last year.”

“Facebook and LinkedIn lead the way. For the first time, the platform most utilized by the Inc. 500 is Facebook with 74% of companies using it. Virtually tied at 73% is the adoption of the professional network, LinkedIn. As you can see in the graph above, video and podcasting use declined in this period. The researchers theorized that companies are spending more time on Facebook at the expense of blogs and video. “

http://www.businessesgrow.com/2012/01/29/why-are-americas-fastest-growing-companies-killing-their-blogs/

So is blogging dead, or is it something else?

Personally I believe that blogging is not dead, it’s just too much work for a society that wants everything instantly. People don’t want to read a newspaper or a magazine – they want a sound bite, a snipped, a 2 sentence synapses of the news because they don’t want the facts, just some details.

Like facebook, they don’t want to explain the experience, they are satisfied with just giving you detail: “just saw this movie, it was great”. Who needs to worry about grammar, sentence structure, figuring out how to correctly convey how you felt – if all you have to do is log into facebook that can pin point where you are and you write “Awesome movie”.... And ofcourse, if you get a response it usually is a small comment or the click of the like button, if you get a response at all.
Just like the art of letter writing, blogging has become too time consuming, too much work, an effort, a hassle. I remember how people would say that people prefer emails over letter writing because you can instantly send a note to anyone you wanted and they would respond back to you in a blink of an eye. Considering that now a day’s most people send an email and do not expect an immediate response, rather, they understand that it can be hours even days before some people will respond. Why, becuase even responding to an email is apparently hard work.

So like the art of writing a letter, emails – facebook and social sites of the like, may have conditioned not only business but people in general to believe that bloging is just too much work. Why write a blog? Why read a Blog? Why even bother when all you need is to check your facebook account and see if your friend stayed home or went shopping. Why read the news, when you can get up to the minute accounts of current events that are happening now from regular people like you and I. So why even blog, if people prefer Fb, twitter? If people cannot find the time to respond to a facebook comment, why would they bother to even read much less respond to your blog post?

“ A recently available article published in the New York Times states that that the number of bloggers between the ages of twelve and seventeen has been reducing dramatically. The study takes this statistic and uses it to pose the question of whether or not blogging as a whole is starting to fall out of favor and whether or not its use as an online communication tool has died. Do you feel this is the case? Is blogging, particularly in the online marketing and online sales arena, dying? If it turns out to be real, what does this necessarily mean for internet marketers and the field of sales? We chose to look into this query and find out whether or not it is true and what kind of implication this poses for the internet market arena.

The very first thing that we discovered is that blogging, especially in terms of aiding one’s ability to communicate online is not truly dying. The statistic of people aged 12-17 blogging less often does not necessarily indicate that blogging is going away. What is in fact happening is that people in this age group are just migrating over to Twitter and, especially, Facebook–the service that offers people the ability to create “notes” which can act in much the same fashion as blog entries and allow the user to control who is able to see what they have written down. Adults are far more likely to produce their own web properties than kids particularly because pesky things like parental consent are not an issue.

“http://makemoneywhileyousleep-residualincome.com/internet-marketing/is-blogging-dying/

Is Facebook is next?
So my question is – if facebook kills blogging, then apps will kill facebook? Yes, if you follow the natural pattern of things, facebook will die. Well, die in the sense of how it works with the business model it has created. What facebook has done to blogging, applications will do to facebook.

Why do I make such a bold statement considering that Facebook’s IPO will be the largest IPO in all of history? That the craze behind FB and its hundreds of millions of users will sure find it’s demise in the very “nature” it accustomed it’s user in order to kill blogging. The generation, the culture FB has created is one of, ease, of solitude – you do not need to communicate, you do not need to express – you only share details. And that is what applications will do to rob FB of it’s business module and popularity [ atleast with the websites ability to make money ].

FB relies on traffic and the eyes that traffic brings – when FB talks about “Monetizing” the website, it usually means "advertising". The sad thing is, it will soon be too much trouble to sign into facebook. Too much trouble to log in, when a simple app can bring you all the status comments, image uploads and more straight to your cell phone.

I have such an FB application. I do not get ads, I do not log into my FB home page, or even my personal FB home page. I have an app called “Friend Stream” on my Droid smart phone and I get everything on my phone that is shared by my FB friends. As smart phones and tablets grow in popularity more and more apps will be created and a new easier way of connecting to FB friends will be formed that will eventually kill the need of logging into facebook and being bothered with those pesky ads. Ah, the ease of reading your friends comment and pressing the like button will be easier than ever before. And is not that "ease of use" that killed blogging. Many said that laptops threaten the desks top computer, that tablets threaten laptop sales and smart phones in cooperation with apps may kill Facebook.

The very same thing that is presumed to have killed blogging in favor of Facebook, will also kill FB itself. If you train people to seek the “ease of use” of your product, that mentally, that same desire will be used in driving your traffic away from your business, in this case facebook. Why did Google become so popular? It is said that Google not only had good search results, but they made it easy for people. How is Google trying to compete with Microsoft’s web browser – by making a simpler easier to use browser- Chrome. Fabebook is trying to offer search capabilities to its user’s in order to broaden it’s hold on user’s – but FB is based on the ability of its users to tell friends what they are doing, how they feel, and to vent frustration – even when they expect no response to their action.

So if more and more users become smart phone and tablet users – it will become easier for users and often times it is the only way to connect to Fb, to use apps that bypass the need to go to Facebooks website at all. If you can send and receive your FB comments or tweets without ever visiting the website, the site loses its most important commodity of all – Web Traffic.

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