Is Social media killing the blog?
As many of you have no doubt deduced (or just plain read about) my blog, twitter account, and facebook profile are all tied together.
I did this so that I could stay connected with and update my friends and family in whatever way is most convenient for them.
Making them check DougMeade.com all the time JUST IN CASE I’ve updated it - when they are already addicted to facebook and/or twitter just seemed a lot to ask.
In the time things have been working that way - I’ve noticed an interesting, but not surprising trend.
I call it decentralized commenting.
When I update my “status” or create a new blog post - Twitter, facebook, and DougMeade.com all get updated automagically.
The great news is that my friends, family, and followers get the updates and there’s no “extra” effort on their part. It happens as a part of their regular daily routine.
That’s really cool and fosters great interaction.
When updates come to people in a convenient and engaged way - they are more apt to respond.
But they do so in the the context they received the update.
So if they are facebook fanatics they’ll comment there.
If there a twitter addict - they’ll reply or direct message me there.
Thus my dear old blog sees fewer and fewer comments - even though I’m getting more and more interaction with my audience!
This is ok with me as my site is a personal one.
It’s a quick “log” of what’s going on at a given time that one day when I’m gone may be an interesting read for my kids.
I don’t need to impress people with comment counts.
But I do wonder if larger (more commercial) blogs are seeing the same problem.
I suppose one could build some sort of integration to sync comments just as I’ve sync’d posts… but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort for ME to build that. Probably someone will. And I’ll gladly adopt the solution once it’s done.
Until then I supposed I’ll have to accept that when you streamline one thing it just makes the less streamlined parts stand out all the more.
That worked great because twitterTools doesn’t create posts for twitter replys - so I never had to worry about facebook being updated with those.
