The Evolution of the Blog
As a social intelligence firm, we do a lot of research; that’s our life blood. So naturally, we look at trends and broader “uses” of Social Media technologies. Blogs are a key element in our research and here’s what we noticed this past year in how blogs have evolved.
A recent study by PEW Internet suggests about 11% of online people in the U.S. actively blog and of that only about 23% actually read blogs. Our findings are similar though we note Canada has a higher % of bloggers active. What we wanted to look at however, was the least and most successful blogs; how they have evolved in terms of architecture and usage.
Length: We found that of the most successful blogs, 87% tended to be 250 words or less in length for each posting. The longer the paragraphs, the less successful the blog.
Links: Blogs with higher search engine rankings have more outbound links with an average of 3.5 outbound links per blog post.
Video Blogs: Video blogs (vlogs) over 3 minutes in length tend to be viewed less. Our study group reported they would view a video blog an average of 64 seconds.
Comments: The top blogs in our research saw an average of 10 comments per posting across the board. We noted that 75% of the time these were simple statements of agreement and 8% of the time a form of conversation would take place in the comment sections. We also noted that 22% of the time in comments, they would go off topic. With video blogs, comments tended to be shorter (4-8 words 92% of the time) than on text blogs.
Media Mix: We noted that bloggers who mix images, video and text had a higher rate of comments (31.4% of the time) than plain text.
Business Blogs: Here we looked at blogs written “by” a business, that is, not an individual who is a consultant, but a business with multiple employees, even an enterprise. They averaged less outbound links (1.5) per post and had an average of 3 comments per post and less engagement. We distinctly separated business blogs because they skewed our findings. We also found businesses tended to be less frequent in posting (62% less) than individuals and only 14% of business blogs ever had the author respond to comment strings after a post.
Our summary is that blogs have become shorter and “snappier” as our online attention span seems to be getting shorter as well. The comprehensive data is for clients, but we wanted to share the highlights of our findings.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
With business blogs, do you mean posts straight up “by” the business, or are there still individual names associated with the post. I do notice the infrequency of posts as well though, too. I wonder if the business bloggers feel more pressure where they’re representing a business, compared to a personal blog where it’s just yourself?
Yes, we do mean “by” the business itself rather than by an individual who regularly posts for the business.
I suspect you’re right in the sense of feeling pressure representing a business. I also suspect it is in part because people connect with people and less so with a business. A consumer may also feel a business blog is a marketing message and be more suspicious of the purpose of the blog.
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