Social Media | New Rules of Marketing and PR | Marketing | Best Practices | Artificial Intelligence
With the popularity of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok as well as the rapid rise of chatbots accessing Generative AI Models, the once humble blog has rising in importance (once again) as a marketing strategy.
People often question if blogs are still relevant. The answer is yes! Maybe even more so than in the past.
Blogs are your content and with your own URL, it is your content real estate (not that of a mammoth tech media company).
Blogs to get found in AI search
Although we are less than a year since the launch of ChatGPT to the public, it seems clear that the chatbots frequently return content from recognized experts. I predict this will be even more important in the future as simply scraping the public web (as the AI Large Language Models have done) will be less viable due to contract licensing issues and quality concerns.
The better known you and your blog become, the more likely it becomes that the chatbots will point to your content. Like traditional SEO, you will need to get links to your blog content and, if you can, mentions from the media.
Blogs in the Age of Social Networking
Yes, social networking sites are excellent ways to market your products and services. Depending on your marketplace, any of the large social networks or many thousands of other social networks might be right for you.
But for long-term marketing success for your business and your personal brand, you need a blog or similar permanent content site that you own and control.
The problem with social networks is they come and they go. You simply cannot rely on the companies behind social networks to be there forever. And you can't trust that those companies will be active over the long haul to display your content in the way you originally intended (Facebook comes to mind here).
Always remember, the social network owns your content on each platform, not you.
Google Plus launched in mid-2011 and became the fastest growing social network in history. However, in 2019, less than a decade after launch, the service shut down. All the content tens of millions of people had posted on G+ disappeared. That's not the first time a popular social network closed. Several years ago, Twitter announced it would shut down its social video app, Vine. Rats. I had used Vine and found it to be a fun way to share six-second videos. But many people invested way more time than I did, some spending hundreds of hours creating and curating a social presence there. All that work was lost in an instant.
Blogs are alive and well
Many people have said to me, “Blogs are dead.” Nonsense. Your blog, or similar informational site with content you own and curate, is never going to go away. If you have a custom URL, it's your content. Nobody can take it away because its yours forever.
Unlike most social networks, the search engines index content from your blog—and that traffic goes to you. Isn’t that cool?
