Blogging Is A Calling, People

Someone on Facebook tipped me off to More Companies Quit Blogging, Go With Facebook Instead in USA Today. It fascinated me for a couple of reasons.

1. Recently there was some discussion at another author's personal Facebook page regarding how effective our professional pages are. It's very possible that only a small percentage of our "Likes" actually see our posts from a business/professional/fan page (however you want to think of it). So moving to Facebook may not be the great marketing extravaganza conventional wisdom claims it to be. Though, of course, if you're a big enough company with enough followers, even if only a small percentage of them gets any particular post, you're still talking good numbers.

2. Writers are encouraged to maintain blogs. It probably makes a little more sense for us to do it then, say, Owens Corning (see the first link above). We're supposed to be able to communicate, right? Presumably a blog, for us, should be a publication site for short-form writing, thoughts, etc. That, of course, is not why we're encouraged to blog. We're encouraged to blog by publishers and marketing types because blogging is believed to be a marketing tool. Yeah, well...

Anyway, I've been to a lot of blogs, people. Checked out many, many. You've got some wildly popular writers who do have blog followings and probably can do some nifty, if not out right serious, bloggy marketing. But that's not the case with most writers. Even a few hundred followers is not going to provide a lot of sales. Or even a lot of comments and engagement. There's nothing wrong with blogging to market, but if that's why you're blogging, yeah, maybe you could use your time better somewhere else. Though I can't say that that somewhere else is necessarily Facebook.

Clearly, many of the businesses, big and small, that are leaving blogging were never really into blogging. They were looking for something else. Blogging is one of those things you really need to do for its own sake. I blog for the sake of blogging. I blog to blog. Maybe it's a zenny thing. So much in life is.