5 Reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant

A funny thing has happened over the last six months – many of the blogs I’ve been following have gone silent while at the same time the amount of chatter on and about Twitter has been manic.

Has Twitter killed the blog?

I must admit, it’s often way easier to post a small sound bite with a link rather than spend an hour or two to write a full post on a topic.  Twitter has a few inherent advantages over most blogs:

1. Unlike most personal blogs, you can scale up your twitter following very quickly. Go out and find 1000 or so like-minded people (or at least people who are interested in your industry or topic) and most will return the favour and follow you back.  This is especially appealing for those who have a small technorati rating of 1 or 2 – which essentially says nobody knows about your blog and even fewer visit
2. Most new bloggers hit a wall after a few weeks or months of posting… they just run out of things to say. With twitter you only need to throw out a zinger with a tinyurl and you can say you’ve contributed to the conversation that day…. which is why twitter is classified as a micro-blog.  
3. Twitter feels more like a community than most blogs. With hash tags and hundreds of Twitter tools, you can reach out, engage, follow and feel part of the conversation no matter where you are. Blogs only really feel like communities when you get a ton of comments… which is really hard for the majority of blogs to get.
4. It’s easier to follow somebody’s tweets on mobile than trying to load their blog into your mobile web browser. Most people haven’t figured out that there are some pretty nifty RSS readers for mobile so they just don’t bother
5. It’s the cool thing to do right now. Just as everybody had to have a blog a few years ago, everybody needs to be on twitter. You can’t call yourself a social media guru / expert / subject matter expert without being on twitter.  

Having a regular tweet schedule has certainly impacted the frequency of my own blog articles – although integrating my tweets into this blog (right column) has allowed me to keep the conversation going between posts – which was kind of the point of twitter in the first place.