With the sheer number of posts that you can see on Twitter and Instagram, you’re constantly surrounded by a stream of bite-sized content that’s easy to read and understand. Visual-heavy and widely-used, you must wonder if there’s still room for and value in blogging. After all, do people still have the time and attention for reading long-form work?

Keep reading to find out where blogs still have the edge, and how social media has made bloggers rethink their content. It just might give you ideas for the way you present your own thoughts!

Social media still links to articles and blogs

It can be tempting to dismiss blogging as a thing of the past, but in reality, a lot of the links and posts shared on social media still go back to linking to longer posts. There just isn’t as much room to go into your thoughts on social media, unlike blog posts – which function a lot like online journals and have space for your words.

Social media alone doesn’t allow you to expand on your points

A related point is that social media’s formats don’t allow for nuanced discourse or longer thoughts. It’s a lot harder to explain what you think in just a handful of Tweets.

Even if you connect them into a thread, there’s always the danger that someone will read it separately and misinterpret it without context. There’s much less room for that in blogging, where you can write whole paragraphs expanding on an idea until you clearly illustrate your point.

However, blogs could learn a lot from mixing in social media content

There’s something to be said about the easy-to-read style of social media. Blogs could take their cues from platforms like Twitter and Instagram and use these cues to make their posts more engaging.

They could mix in more visual sections, such as GIFs or photo grids. They could also learn to make short listicle style pieces, or deliberately constrain themselves with a smaller word count to keep their entries concise and engaging.

Blogs also have an edge when it comes to SEO

The sheer volume of Tweets and IG posts is also a problem for their platforms. Google is still the world’s top search engine, and its results are more likely to point to blogs for their relevant content and search results. It’s estimated that 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted every day, as opposed to 2 billion on Facebook and an even smaller fraction on Instagram.

The higher your SEO (search engine optimization) rankings, the more likely you are to pop up as a first-page result in a Google search, boosting your visibility to audiences and future clients. That’s something quality blogging can do which social media still can’t, despite its hashtags.

Your blog posts are yours

Ownership of your blog and its content is very clear – if you have your own site, that’s yours and yours alone. Compare that to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where it’s unwise to keep it as a base for your brand or work.

Use social media to boost your visibility – but you should still have a main site where your values, ideas, and messages are clear and attributable to you.

Social media hasn’t ended blogging, but it can be a powerful tool for increasing a blog’s reach and expanding its audience. If you’re a blogger or social media manager, consider mixing strategies from these two online media. It’ll make for a much stronger digital impact!