David Jonah convinced me to start blogging back in 2004. Since then I have written 3,463 posts. Likely most of it is crap – with a few nuggets of value along the way.
It’s interesting to see how things have changed in that time. In the early days I would get several hundred readers of a typical blog post – sometimes a thousand or more if it was a hot topic or during an election period when people seemed to be far more active. Then along came Twitter and readers to my blog started to slowly decline. The expansion of social media mostly reduced my readership to a rump of diehards that either liked or hated my stuff. By the way this trend exhibits itself in the comments section. In the early days I could get 100 comments on a popular blog – now it is common to get none directly on the blog itself (a few on social media).
It seems clear to me that people are crumbling under the weight of their social media and stuff like mine falls into the ‘read the headline’ and move on. I can write a 1,000 word blog with tables and charts – and get a few views and a couple of ‘likes’ on social media. If I wrote “Trump is a bum” on Twitter I would get a thousand likes and retweets. I’m not sure what that means but I hope we haven’t reduced our thoughtful media consumption to 140 characters and highly provocative content just because it stands out.
Anyway, along comes LinkedIn. I more or less didn’t think much of LinkedIn until recently – a place you put your resume. But since I started posting to LinkedIn I am getting several hundred hits per post. I assume this is because a) people aren’t crumbling under the weight of trivial posts on LinkedIn like they are on Twitter (I had to stop following some folks because every day it was just a constant stream of anti-Trump posts – from a Nobel prize winner, no less); and b) folks in my LinkedIn ‘network’ would have a more natural interest in the subject matter.
So, video killed the radio star (not really), Twitter killed the blogger and LinkedIn to the rescue. Long live LinkedIn.
I’ve gotta say that I’m really enjoying seeing you back in blogging mode. Yes there might be less comments on the site but it doesn’t make the content any less valuable.
You are correct that recently articles on LinkedIn are more likely to be viewed and read as there can be a lot of noise on the other social networks. As LinkedIn is geared more for professional connections I think that you are likely to see more content posted that is of higher quality as people don’t want to spam their business contacts.