Does opening a blog still make sense in the Facebook era?
There are companies, like Apple, that present every new thing they do as a revolution. Others, like Google and Facebook, that introduce things more quietly, with a whisper, changing, a little bit at a time, they way we work and communicate.
Facebook has been promoting on pages and profiles for a while now a function that seems nearly as old as the Internet: RSS feeds. If you’re interested in a page (or a person) on Facebook you can click on a button and be kept up-to-date from then on about whatever is written or posted there.
RSS feeds were (and still are) the main tool for promoting blogs, the personal web logs officially born in 1997 when Jorn Barger, an American businessman with a passion for hunting, decided to open a personal webpage in order to share his hobby. If you found a site that you liked you simply clicked on the feed icon and created a permanent one-way link to it. Like subscribing to a newspaper. This means that today a Facebook page is actually a blog competitor (and a quite fierce one at that). Which leads one to wonder: does opening a blog still make sense in the Facebook era? To answer the question, we can start by setting out some of the characteristics of each medium.
Both allow one to publish articles, photos, and videos and offer everyone the possibility to share content for free: ideas, reflections, news and anything else you can think of. And then there are the differences.
Differently from a Facebook page, a blog has no boundaries. Anyone with an Internet connection can read it, with no limitations. On Facebook however, while some content may be visible to everyone, in practice readers must be Facebook members in order to read content on the site. They have to join. Thus a blog has a potential readership of about 2,095,006,005 people (an estimate from the Internet World Stats 2011), while a Facebook page reaches (so to speak) just slightly over 800 million people (official estimate of the site). Facebook, however, let’s you be seen better. Thanks to the mechanisms created by friend networks, groups, “liking” content, and so on, it offers an individual dissemination tools that are more efficient than a blogger, whether it’s your 12 year old son or Pete Cashmore, will ever be able to create.
So upon a first look, since that audience of 2 billion people is only theoretic, a Facebook page today has more possibility to be reached and followed than a blog. And yet I’ve written this post on a blog and not on Facebook. Why?
Because Facebook is not, at least not yet, the Internet. And until it becomes such (some say it will happen sooner or later), publishing a blog still offers something that’s not available on Facebook: freedom. To the contrary of a Facebook page, which is strictly laid out in a standard format, a blog can be invented from scratch on the basis of the author’s creativity and imagination. It can be an old-fashioned newspaper or an agglomerate of cross-media widgets that connect to all of planet’s social networks. If you have a blog you can choose to post your content automatically on whichever platforms you like, without interference from the alliances of the net’s big names. This is something you can’t do on Facebook, because it’s the site that suggests to you to connect with this or that network, or impedes you from creating a connection with one (that’s probably a competitor). With the right tools, you can write on your blog and publish your content instantaneously on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare and another dozen platforms, if you wish. Or none of these, if you prefer to speak only to a small group of followers.
Writing online today requires an intelligent use of social networks. And as Facebook is unquestionably the social network leader, it has to be a part of any sensible dissemination strategy. But starting with a blog (or a website, by now the two terms are nearly synonymous) it is you and no one else who decides the form, the color and the dimensions of the way in which you will share your content on web.
Is Facebook killing the blog? Not as far as I can see, no.
