Blogs are more influential than social networks

So says the latest Technorati digital influence report anyway.  It should be noted as a caveat of course that Technorati are a blog search engine, so they might be accused of looking out for their own with the report.  There are however some interesting findings.

The report marks a shift from their traditional State of the Blogosphere report, branching out to analyse the full range of social media.  It saw them survey 6,000 influencers, 1,200 consumers and 150 top brand marketers.

An interesting finding was that despite spending on social generally rising, just 11% of social spending went towards blogger outreach and general influencer engagement.  This is despite their belief that blogs influence consumers more than any other form of social media.

pr-online-services-high-in-influence

In other words, where brands spend money and where consumers are influence is rather disconnected.  A fundamental reason for this is the relatively poor ROI attributed to content marketing and blogger outreach.  This is underlined by the most common metrics used to judge success.

pr-success-for-inflluencers

As you can see, most fall firmly in the vanity metrics camp, with no mention of anything directly attributable to the success or otherwise of the brand.

If content marketing is to achieve the results it is capable of then it needs to start both delivering and proving grown up results that benefit the business.

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5 thoughts on “Blogs are more influential than social networks

  1. I was surprised to see Twitter so low on that list! Blogging is a time and tested method for increasing user engagement, brand authority and influence and I thank you for bringing up these stats to prove it! I wish more businesses saw these reports and I'm certainly going to be sharing this with my clients.

    • Interesting isn't it? I must say, I have never used Twitter before making a purchase. After a purchase it can be useful to begin a customer service conversation, but I seldom use it beforehand. Blogs, reviews, forums etc tend to be much more influential in that sense.

    • I am not surprised by Twitter ranking low on that question, because really, it's not the best platform to influence or be influenced by brands. Great media for customer service, promotional communications or informations about a product, modifications and so on. But influence? Not so much.
      But I agree with you too, Gazalla: it's great to see blogging given the proper credit as many of us know how blogs can provide thought leadership and brand credibility leading to influence and trust. Which leads to purchase…

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