Blogs: Current Phenomenon & Community's Benefit

Blogging has become part of our lives as it is available to everyone for free and it manages the change in ways of publishing. On the other hand, it has become a phenomenon for people to build relationship in the social media network. According to Sussman (2009) in Technorati, most bloggers were motivated to blog about their self-expression and sharing expertise.

According to BlogPulse, the Nielson Company's source of blogging statistic and trivial data, on April 26, 2011 there were over 160 millions identified blogs in existence (Blogpulse.com, 2011). Below is the data by Nielson Company.

Source: www.blogpulse.com on April 26, 2011

Technorati studies shown that, in year 2010, the significant growth of mobile blogging the key trend of blogging and it is moving vastly and rapidly (Sobel, 2010). The main blogging trend were personal musings, technology, business, news and politics. 

According to the State of Inbound Marketing survey 2011 in HubSpot, based on survey of 644 professionals that familiar with their business strategies, 57% of companies using blogs reported that they acquires customers from leads generated directly from their blogs. In addition, more and more businesses are blogging and they are aware that their blogs are highly valuable. 85% of businesses rated their companies blogs as 'useful', 'important' or 'critical'. Furthermore, it is stated that the percentage of the businesses that have blogs has grown from 48% to 65% from year 2009 to 2011 (HubSpot.com, 2011).

Source:
 http://www.hubspot.com/Portals/53/docs/ebooks/the2011stateofinboundmarketingfinal.pdf

The figures above shows that blog is the channel that most frequently reported as critical or important in both year 2009 and 2011.

The business blogging offers huge potential benefits from reduced cost and enhanced performance. To a certain extent, business have started to utilize blogs for the purpose for marketing, building brand, engaging customers, and knowledge sharing.


References


BlogPulse, 2011, Blogpulse Stats, viewed on April 26, 2011, http://www.blogpulse.com/


HubSpot, 2011, The 2011 State of inbound marketing , February 2011, viewed on April 26, 2011, http://www.hubspot.com/Portals/53/docs/ebooks/the2011stateofinboundmarketingfinal.pdf


Sobel, J, 2010, State of the Blogosphere 2010 Introduction, technorati.com, viewed on April 26, 2011, http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2010-introduction/

Sussman, M, 2009, Day 2 - The What and Why of Blogging - SOTB 2009, technorati.com, viewed on April 26, 2011, http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-2-the-what-and-why2/