Deep within Technorati’s annual State of The Blogosphere report were buried some rare and very interesting statistics on business blogging behaviour, important enough, we thought to turn into an infographic (see here)
New Business THIRD most important reason to blog?
The stand out discovery for me, was how little importance companies currently place on the ability of blogs to generate new business with ‘sharing expertise’ and ‘professional recognition’ both seen as more important purposes of the business blog.
Businesses are missing a trick here, the trick of inbound marketing, where the content on your blog can travel virally to engage new customers and equally pull in customers via SEO. Blogs build communities too, a ready-made audience to engage with, so long as you have good enough content.
Why invest in quality content then?
Interestingly, while most businesses are not yet making the connection between great blogs and new business, they are willing to invest in content. According to Technorati’s research, 44% of companies are prepared to invest in dedicated writers – essential if the quality and quantity of blog content is to be maintained.
Twitter is NOT the most important social media channel
One of the stats I simply disagree with – that Twitter is the most important social media channel to market a blog. In our experience of corporate blogging, LinkedIn is actually the most important social media channel, followed by Twitter, while Facebook is a long way behind. When you’re starting a corporate blog, LinkedIn is the fastest way of achieving relevant traffic, via the discussion sections of relevant groups.
It’s all about WordPress
When it comes to platforms, BlogStar loves WordPress, in all its, flexible, open source plugin sexiness and so do the majority of businesses – 53%, a long way ahead of Blogger at 14%.
The measure of a blog’s performance
The seventh fact we extracted is probably the most important because if you don’t measure the performance of a blog, its value will never be properly established. And the stats prove that hardly any businesses do.
The most popular metric is site traffic though this is probably only by default as businesses now know to run Google analytics behind their website, rather than any conscious effort to measure blog performance.
More effective measurement and an objective setting approach are critical if companies are to evolve their blogs from dusty corporate silos into the marketing powerhouses they could be.
