Is Social Media a Threat to Blogging?

Before the rise of social media the main marketing tactic for a blogger to market their blog was building an email list and using that to distribute their content. It was hard work and many bloggers developed clever email list building tactics that facilitated the sharing of their blog. Bloggers built their online brand one email subscriber at a time. Social media initially was seen as a threat to blogging. When I joined Facebook in 2008 it had less than 100 million users and people were rapidly joining the social network. Expressing yourself online was now easier and more social. Some people were even predicting the demise of blogging. Would Facebook kill the blog? Micro blogging also started to appear in the guise of a strange sounding social media platform called “Twitter”. The questions were being asked would blogging descend into shallow snippets of information in 140 characters or less. Would micro content create a superficial social web? As Twitter rapidly grew it proved to be a very efficient means to distribute content, engage and grow a network of friends and followers that were interested in your topic globally. Social media has in fact saved blogging from stagnation and extinction as it has accelerated the online sharing and discovery of bloggers on tens of thousands of topics. Social media has though proved to be a marketing mecca for bloggers that made them more visible than they could ever have hoped to be. Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/08/02/blogging-statistics-facts-and-figures-in-2012-infographic/#kXidmU7dlSG3ckrt.99