A recent study shows that Fortune 500 companies are not participating in blogging.
It’s difficult to imagine that large companies are ignoring the benefits of blogging – increased visibility, increased sales leads, and improved customer relations. Large companies are using known entities like Twitter and Facebook to spend their budgets on while blogging takes a backseat.
Fortune 500 Blogging
From How the Fortune 500 Uses Social Media
Just out from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is a study targeting the use of social media by America’s largest companies — the Fortune 500. In particular, the research examines what the big boys are doing when it comes to using blogs, Twitter and Facebook.
And the results show that, as a whole, these top companies — all of which play a significant role in driving the U.S. economy — appear less willing to interact via blogs than they do Facebook and Twitter. Only 116 (23 percent) of the Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog, which is one only percent better than last year.
Blogging does not seem to be an increasing trend among the giants of industry and business. Twitter and Facebook are getting attention from the big fish, but why are blogs being left in the dust?
The author of the article makes some good points.
It’s surprising to me that so many of the Fortune 500 companies continue to ignore the clear and obvious benefits of blogging. As I alluded to in 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Abandon Your Blog for Facebook, choosing to forgo a company-branded blog in favor of a presence on Facebook or Twitter only is a lousy decision.
Business blogs offer innumerable benefits over Facebook and Twitter. Sure, you want your business fishing where the fish are, so to speak, which is why it’d be foolish to ignore the 550 million consumers currently using Facebook, and the 150 million or so registered users of Twitter. But to actively choose to place all of your company’s social capital into someone else’s basket fails to recognize the branded opportunity associated with a well-conceived and managed corporate blog.
Mikal asks some good questions as to why Fortune 500 companies are ignoring blogging. In the article from the above quote you’ll see that he gives five good reasons why companies should blog including branding, SEO, and content ownership.
Why are Fortune 500 Companies Not Blogging?
I can offer a few possible reasons Fortune 500 companies are not blogging.
The most common reason I see a lack of effort with blogs is the actual work involved. The writing for blog posts is usually more involved than most expect depending on the length of the blog posts, type of blog posts, and research for the blog post.
Blogging takes a bit of effort and most people have the wrong expectations for effort and time when they discuss starting a company blog. It’s important to include someone with blogging experience in the discussion of blogging strategy. The more you know about what’s involved in managing a blog the more realistic your expectations will be regarding the time and effort you’ll need to invest.
Frequency is an important factor in the success of blogs. A common pitfall of blogs is the lack of consistent posting. In a business other priorities can take over and leave blogging on the back burner. This leads to inconsistent posting the blog, which hurts the blog’s potential to grow and attract visitors.
Blogging is a full time job for companies. The benefits and payback to hiring a full time blogger to manage a company blog can be great, but as you can see from the study above, full committing to blogging is the difficult part for businesses.
Opportunity
Never fear business readers.
Just because Fortune 500 companies are ignoring the benefits of blogging doesn’t mean you should. There is in fact an opportunity to take advantage of their lack of involvement. You can target the people searching for information in your industry. You can create a blog to attract attention and traffic while building your brand. You can do all this while the big fish in the game are sitting on the sidelines.
Discussion
Why do you think about Fortune 500 companies sitting on the sidelines of blogging?
Is your company taking advantage of their lack of involvement?