Blog 2: Digital Influence

Are Blogs Better?

I had no idea that blogs had so much power for brands online. I completely understand how they can be more persuasive and influential for consumers, but I was unaware that they were so popular. It is interesting to see all this information released 4 years ago, yet, latest from my point of view, nothing has really changed.  A digital influence report from 2013, says that an online blog is more likely to influence a consumer to make a purchase over Facebook, YouTube, and any other social media site. To me this is amazing, companies put so much money into their social media to grow and get their name and products out there. However, the majority of products online influence is coming from real people blogging about the product or service, describing their experience with it. I believe this is so effective since people can relate to each other better human to human, compared to human to company’s social media page. Blog communities usually have a large influence on consumers as it is a smaller number of real people all sharing opinions and offering advice on a common topic. Whereas social media is public to everyone and can often get out of hand, where things are never answered properly or explained thoroughly. Despite the fact that blogs clearly work best for companies, they are still pumping the majority of their digital branding budget into social media advertising. Facebook sees the most of this money in the form of display ads mainly. These are just quick pop up ads that offer little to no interaction, that most people avoid and are annoyed by. I think it would be beneficial for a company to promote an online blog where people can leave suggestions or comments on products and services that would help grow the company. 86% of surveyed digital influencers publish a blog, 59% of them use it as their primary means of content distribution. This means that there is tons and tons of information on all sorts of products and service that are available to you. When looking at social media there are only a couple of sites that people post on frequently. Those being Facebook, and Twitter. The rest of them are hardly posted on more than once a week, you cannot be getting a lot of useful information when there is hardly anything being posted. I believe companies should really get involved in blogging more because social media can spread their word and name, but it cannot interact with the public the way the public finds helpful.