I didn’t say that in my talk at Social Travel Market to be controversial (ok, maybe a little bit!) – I truly believe that from my own experience that social media is killing off the blog – but – only blogs that are setup to create discussion and debate.
Average comments drastically dropped
In the last two years I have seen the number of comments drastically drop from an average of 60 comments per post, to struggling to get 10 comments – what I have found is that readers replies are left all over the social networks like Twitter and Facebook, rather than content left on my blog where it is easier to create a discussion.
Social Networks killing discussion
I understand why this is – but for me it is frustrating when my passion about writing the blog in the first place was to create discussions and debates that no one else is having (and still aren’t!).
I spoke to a number of travel bloggers during the BlogCamp and while at World Travel Market and it seems I am not the only person with the issue of now having discussions spread out all over the internet, rather than in one place.
Other potential issues
I could be partly to blame for this because I have spent considerably less time writing on the blog since May 2009, and my writing pattern of a post every day, has drastically dropped to a few posts a month. Maybe it is that my content isn’t as controversial or as interesting as it was, so I don’t completely blame social media but I think it is having a BIG impact on my blog.
What do you think?
Ten sounds great where I’m coming from
But my point was never to generate discussion, although that helps in being taken seriously by random visitors. My comments are mostly “cannibalized” by email communication (which I encourage) and I haven’t yet found a way to balance the two of them.
Any way, isn’t that part of the purpose of including social media in your blog? Spreading the discussion so that you get more leads from a greater circle of people?
I agree that it’s impossible to carry out a coherent discussion when comments are in different locations e.g. Twitter, Facebook & Google+.
Ditto all of that
[...] a sequel to TBCamp 11 Darren wondered whether Social Media are killing discussions on blogs. Sure they do, but you can cut and paste the answers in the [...]
With a bit of copy and paste you can bring the discussion back to the blog;-)