Monday, March 15, 2010

Blogging vs Other Social Media Platforms

If you only have time to focus on one area of social media for your business, it should be a self-hosted blog. While I don't believe that every company should have a blog, it is the one platform that you own and that stays with you over time.

If you use Facebook and Twitter or one of the other social media tools, they can control that content by blocking, freezing or deleting your account and in some cases, by requiring that you give up partial or full copyrights to the photos and text you post. With Twitter, most of the content is not able to be accessed after a few weeks. With a blog, the content you produce works for you long after you publish it and you retain the full copyright. A blog entry you write today can still contribute to your SEO (search engine optimization) three years from now as people find the text through Google searches.

While the other tools are important to use and the communities are valuable to engage with, a blog is the one social media platform that will outlast them all and that will bring you the most return of investment for your time and money.

2 comments:

Robbie Schlosser said...

Thank you, Liene. Wonderful post, providing a valuable perspective to help us "discern the forest from the trees". Short and sweet, and direct to the point. I'm subscribing to your blog and looking forward to your next post.

SJB Weddings & Events said...

Thanks for this. You are exactly right! Blogging used to be me life and I used to be in love with it. I've lost that somewhere, but this post definitely reminds me that I need to find my blog mojo again. It's necessary!