Why the quickness of social media was the downfall of my blogs

Did you have a blog in the past but let it lay dormant? Where you part of the blogging craze in the middle of last decade, but then you turned to social media?

I have to admit in the past few years blogged less, because I knew that google changed their ranking to prefer longer form blog posts. I don’t really write longer form posts. Mine are usually about 300 words—not the 800-900 words that people are recommending. The 800-900 word blog post was too intimidating for me. So I pretty much stopped posting on my blogs. All my ideas went onto Twitter.

It’s kinda sad, because Twitter doesn’t really get me much interaction. However, it IS a platform built for interaction. But there’s so much noise on Twitter that authentic thoughts get buried among all the hype and one-liners. I may write short, but Twitter is WAY short. Twitter has gotten too much of my attention in the past few years. I twas my first place I’d go to share ideas. I used to share my ideas first to my blog. But that Twitter, it’s so easy and quick.

Perhaps social is too fast. Now, we don’t have to go 800 words long, as Google likes. I enjoy my 300-word blog posts, because they are pure insight. They aren’t stretched out to meet the 800 word length that google prefers.

Even the newspaper industry has long stood behind the 700-800 word length article. The consistency is key to laying out a print edition that relies on words to fill up the space. However, that’s also part of the newspapers’ downfall. You have writers having to create words to match that word count. So you get tons of fluff to fill space.

I get inspired by scripting.org’s blog. The guy often makes quick short blog posts about his current thoughts. Sometimes he writes longer form blog posts, but he often does short interesting ones. He shows me that it’s ok to write off these quick—thoughtful—ideas.

Long live the shorter blog posts! (this one is 350 words and would have no way fit into a tweet)