Here at Greenlight we all love blogs and blogging but to what extent do the rest of the world? Well, you'll be pleased to know they are of the same opinion - so it's not just us! Instead of rooting around for something content based to talk about I thought I'd wow you all with some blogging facts and then look into exactly why people blog. What draws us to blogging, what do we think we'll get out of it and who do we think, or hope, is reading?
So who blogs?
6.7 million people worldwide blog on one of the many blogging platforms out there. 12 million people blog via Social Media.
That might not the same as the number of people who, for example, live in China, but that's a lot of people.
In the US, the most popular blog platform is Blogger which has 46 million unique visitors each month. Just trying to get your head around that should send your synapses into excited convulsions. Mine certainly are!
The majority of bloggers are also women, which I'm not sure how to read into other than, we have a lot to talk about. Blogging platforms also probably lend themselves more to topics and themes stereotypically liked and admired by women. For example, there's a lot of fashion blogs out there and the majority of these bloggers will be women, same with the beauty bloggers, lifestyle, travel, recruitment, among others.
Gender aside, 23% of internet time is spent on blogs and social networks, 77% of internet users read blogs and 53% of bloggers are 21 - 33 years old.
Blogging is good for business
Research shows that businesses that have a blog get 97% more inbound links. Marketers using blogs generate 67% more leads. Research also shows 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post. And lastly, 37% of marketers believe blogging is one of the most important types of content marketing because....
-90% of consumers find customer content useful
-60% of consumers feel a company's positivity after reading their blogging efforts
-70% of consumers learn about a company through articles rather than ads.
Blogger behaviour
There's loads of media theory out there and there's plenty to say about blogging. When you consider the internet on a larger scale, it's full of psychology.
Just consider your behaviour on Social Media and why you say the things you do and you've got a pretty deep psychological study of yourself.
There are already plenty of studies regarding Social Media in the teenage years, driven by the bullying some have received on and off on various Social Media platforms.
Teenagers now feel compelled and pressured to fill their Facebook feeds with pictures of themselves out and about at parties over the weekend, to have something "cool" to talk about during Monday morning registration.
This might seem implausible to those of us over the age of 18 but is it really? We must also feel the same pressures - why else do we 'check in', upload funny pictures taken the night before or write statuses that only exude positively and outgoingness? It's certainly not because people are genuinely interested. It's a form of self-validation.
This negativity is difficult to project onto the blog world but that fascination of who is reading what we're writing still lingers. Blogging is only adding to the wider internet conversation and essentially it's a specific conversation adopted for a website.
Blogging has also opened up conversations about how we can measure creativity. Blogs have adopted a specific unit of measurement and it's small and concise. Digital creation calls for content of this length, it calls for informally written units of creativity.
Blogs are a stream of consciousness, written as quickly as the user has them, often unguarded and personal. These observations are often created off the back or inspired by another article or link online. As one writer puts it, "instead of the medium becoming slave to the content, bloggers are often slaves to their medium." *
* Psychology (Weblogs): Everything old is new again
