Many social media influencers who never had a blog may think to themselves: is it necessary for me to keep a blog since I can just work on my social media fan pages where I already have a massive following?
Well, think again…
Image credit: jeffbullas.com
It’s no doubt that social media offers a lot of advantages. However, it’s not without limitation. We know the rise of social media has also put blogging in the shade. This blog post will shed some light on the importance of blogging and let influencers make a better decision if building their own blog is a wise move.
Here are 10 reasons why social media influencers should consider starting a blog:
1) More information can be conveyed to your audience.
Almost all social media platforms have a limit on the length of content. For example, Twitter has a 280 characters limit per tweet; Instagram caption is limited to 2,200 characters with a maximum of 30 hashtags while Facebook post is limited to 63,206 characters per post. These restrictions make the content rather short, and sometimes less descriptive.
On the contrary, a blog allows you to speak your mind. There’s no such thing as word or character limit. Here, you can publish informative well-written posts (as detailed as you want) because you own the blog.
2) Fully utilize your existing audience base.
Blog and social media used to be two separate entities. “Now blogging and social media not only amicably coexist; they complement each other.” says Guy Kawasaki, the co-author of the Art of Social Media.
Since you already have an existing audience base, it would be an opportunity for you to promote your blog on your social media and bring your pool of audience to another platform owned by you. Read if your social media is interesting, people will definitely read your blog.
3) Unstable social media platform vs. Own platform.
On social media platforms, you are bound by the algorithm, you can’t make your own decision or how you want your content to be shown. For instance, Instagram had updated their timeline to non-chronological order in 2016 and this change in algorithm had annoyed content creators because they noticed reduced visibility and inconstant engagement levels.
In contrast, you will be in total control of all the technical changes on your blog no matter it is a professional or personal blog. You have the freedom to make your decision on what to change, when to change and why to change something from a technical point of view.
4) Gain deeper insights of your audience.
Blog analytics paints a more complete picture of your audience mainly because all your followers/audiences can be gathered on a single platform. Whereas on social media, audiences are very much scattered across different platforms. Thus your social media analytics and insights can only be viewed/read separately. To get a more complete picture of your audience on different social media platforms means that extra work has to be done to combine the findings from each platform.
Furthermore, blog analytics are richer in features compared to those available on social media, which enables you to understand your audience deeply, something that social media platforms are unable to provide. Blog analytics can be extremely helpful especially in determining the strategies to capture audiences that previously did not find your posts compelling. With better analytics data, you can quickly boost the number of organic audience.
5) Maximize the impact of your social media.
As mentioned, social media platforms only allow limited length in postings. It is often very difficult to make an impact. While it is effective to gain impressions on social media using interesting keywords, blog posts can be complementary to maximize the impact of the post.
As blogs can be highly personalized to fit the concept of your own, redirecting audiences from social media to your blog can help improve the impressions of your audiences about the content you create. For instance, WordPress blog can work independently with social media such as the swipe up feature in the Instagram stories.
6) Create more significant influence on purchase decision.
Blogs are more capable than social media in influencing the consumer on decision making during their purchasing process. Moreover,
“Blogs are independent, far reaching & diversified channels that tap into a deeper connection than review aggregators: peer-to-peer trust that a blogger has with their own audience.”- Triangle Direct Media
Image credit: jeffbullas.com
According to a survey by Technorati Media, blogs are one of the top three online services for influencing consumer purchase decision, right after retail and brand websites. Moreover, studies also found that 50% of blog readers find blogs useful for purchase information.
7) Gain extra profit with blog
With your existing audience base, it will not be too difficult for you to gain traffic for your blog. So why not gain some easy money by displaying ads on your blog? There are two ways to start making money from Google AdSense:
- Based on impressions: You earn based on your page views. For example, for every 1,000 page views you get, you earn a fix amount.
- Based on clicks: You’ll earn a certain cut of the ad revenue when your visitors click on the ads on your blog.
AdSense can be used on free Blogger blogs as well as self-hosted blogs such as WordPress (free WordPress blog is not compatible). Some bloggers make few thousands per month easily entirely from Adsense revenue alone. Besides, you can also earn from affiliate marketing. For example, providing incentives for your audience to use a product or service in exchange for a commission for every purchase (or other action required by affiliate product supplier). If you have no idea how to start, here’s an affiliate program for you to start with.
8) Combine all your content posting (in all forms) onto a single platform.
Blogs allow you to use various file formats such as MP3, video, images and so on. Unlike social media like Instagram which only allows you to upload images and videos with limitation (there is a time-limit imposed on each individual video being posted).
So, you can treat your blog as a place to combine all your content in various forms, allowing you to deliver richer content to your audience.
9) Increase your exposure through SEO.
With a blog, people have better chances to find your post even without searching or knowing your name, unlike social media which have little to no chance at all. Besides that,
“with your own blog and domain name, you are able to keep all of the Google credit for yourself instead of handing over pagerank to the social network.”- Blog Bloke
You can increase your exposure through SEO. There are many factors that can help you improve your ranking such as high quality content, HTTPS encryption, good keywords and so on.
10) Organic reach of social media is getting lower and lower.
Organic reach on social media refers to how well your posts perform without investing any money. And it is getting lower and lower, probably due to the algorithm changes on those platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The organic reach on Facebook has been decreasing for some time and they are deciding to show users more content from friends and family in their newsfeeds. In turn, they will be showing less content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.
“If it’s happening at Facebook, it’s happening on other social platforms too. This means your social media posts aren’t reaching as many people as before.”- Hootsuite
So to fellow social media influencers out there, perhaps it’s time to give blogging a try? Feel free to comment below to let us know what you think.
Cheers!
