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.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Best Practices, Reputation•
on November 2nd, 2009•
Content chunking? A rather clunky phrase we use to describe breaking up your content for a press release or when promoting an important story about your business online. It helps when your building a story for release, to think of where you might be placing that story on various Web channels or how a press release might be broken up into fragments by bloggers or journalists or when “tweeted.”
Pick Up 2.0: These two words used to mean a reporter/journalist/editor at a newspaper/radio/TV got your story and then ran it or called for an interview. It still does, and that’s still important. But today it also means a blogger or regular citizen might send your story over Twitter or via their blog.
The Importance of the Headline: If it was important pre-Social Media then it’s even more important today. As you write a headline today, it’s not just to get the editors attention, you also want it to be “tweetable” on Twitter or a similar network. If its a good story, then be sure it can spread with a kicker headline.
The Content Chunks: Which brings us to the concept of “chunking” in that we have found that a press release or story should be written in a way that it can be broken down into chunks of content. Some blogs may only refer to a paragraph in the release or you may only be able to write a paragraph on some news seeding sites (i.e. newsvine). You may want to have a short bit for a Facebook company or group page or your LinkedIn company page.
The key is to know where you regularly “seed” your content from a press release or story and ensure the content can be adapted to each of the services you use. On average, we’ll “seed” a press release for clients to over 15 different online sources within relevant services. Yes, it adds work and puts ever more onus on the writer of the release, but it can help with SEO and generally getting to more of the right eyeballs wherever they may be in this vast media channel world.
We’re often asked by a client “can you ghost write for me, cause we a) don’t have the time or b) no one here is a good writer.” Our answer is that we’re happy to do some writing, but never as a “ghost.” It would certainly be easy to do so, we’ve seen it done. We’ve also seen how it can bite back. Hard.
There are several ramifications to ghost writing for a company blog. Some of these we note are;
- Legal: As a ‘ghost” writer you are “representative” of the clients “voice” and there are potential legal hazards that could lead to trouble for the writer and the client. This should be discussed with the client and indemnification written into a contract if this avenue is pursued.
- Consistency: if you’re ghost writing for a blog, how long will the client want you to write for? There may be issues around the consistency of tone & manner, length and detail. Once you stop, and a client may not have the patience required for a blog to become effective, there can be consistency issues.
- Honesty & Reputation: Social Media is about emotion (see a good post on Collective Thoughts on this issue) and as such, when people read a blog and discover it was a ghost writer, especially for a business, they may feel “spun” and you may subsequently be coaching a client through a Social Media crisis situation. This perhaps, is the most important point, for reputation is everything and this is compounded in Social Media.
In our case, we are open about who we are when writing on a blog for a client, and why we’re doing the writing. We engage in the discussion and if the client is just engaging in Social Media it puts a more human face on the client, avoiding the One Way communication syndrome pre-Web 2.0 days.
What might you add to this list? Do you disagree? What is your experience?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)