Every time I have to do a blog post assignment for my Social Media marketing class, I dread it and usually wait until the bitter end to do it. It takes me all week to figure out what I want to blog about and whether or not I believe it would be a relatively interesting topic. This involves a lot of hair pulling, to then asking friends and family for topic ideas, only to disregard any of their suggestions and use my own. I am not a blogger nor do I read blogs (except for these assignments) and tend to lean on the side of thinking blogs are sort of an outdated social media platform.
So, as you may have been able to guess… my blog post will be on whether or not they are still relevant. With having so many other social media network options out there, blogging seems too time consuming with the fast pace living we are in today. People seem to have less attention spans and just want to get to the point of why they visited that post. For example, I have been looking up on how to make hexagon shelves and kept getting sent to blog pages. Yet I never read the blogs and why they decided to write about this particular subject or their detailed explanation on why some things didn’t work compared to others. I scroll down to where they have the instructions and what you need and I go from there.
I came across a couple Youtube channels and articles about this topic to try to figure out if I was on to something or not. Starting with the YouTubers, Neil Patel and Create and Go with each of these channels stating that blogging has evolved and they are/aren’t relevant if you are/are not willing to evolve with the times. It’s no longer being able to just write a blog and you’ll have a whole bunch of subscribers, but rather you need to have popular social media networks where you can post a link of your blog on it so people can click it if they are interested in knowing more. They also go into more details on how to improve your blog if this is the area you’d like to go in.
Moving on to the articles, they each pretty much stated the same thing as the youtubers. That you need to be able to evolve with the times and that just writing what you think is not enough. You need to have subject matter that isn’t all over the place. It needs to have a common theme that you stick with throughout the site and incorporate other social media platforms that people can browse through. I’ve said it above and I’ll say it again…people have short attention spans and want to be engaged with the content. As each article states you need to add multi-media to your blog posts and can no longer be just a writing platform. For example, pictures, gif’s, video, polls, other social media networks, etc, etc., in order to keep people engaged and want to come back for more is the only way to stay alive in this game. I’ll post the website of these articles at the end of this post.
In conclusion, do I think they are no longer relevant …yes I do think they are no longer relevant. I will stubbornly think blogs are just people writing what they believe in, or what they are interested in or even how their day went and these are boring to me. Me writing this blog post for class doesn’t seem like it will be relevant for others. On the bright side though, I’ve learned to appreciate blog posts more and will hopefully take the time to read it all the way through. I’ve learned like everything else, we need to evolve and adapt with the world in order to stay relevant and continue to grow. Will I continue to write blog posts when my course is complete… short answer no. However, I will try to promote blogs on my social media accounts if they are relevant to my personal brand.
References
Articles:
http://www.makealivingwriting.com/stop-writing-blog-posts-do-this-instead
https://www.blogtyrant.com/is-blogging-finally-dead/
YouTube:
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 