One more post on Twitter you may sigh, but wait. A client asked me the other day to do some research to determine the effect that Twitter is having on blogging. He asked me to examine Twitter as an economic complementary, or substitute product to blogging, and try to come up with a mathematical rule to disprove the Null Hypothesis: Twitter does or does not affect blogging of individuals or communities?
Factors to consider:
Twitter is easier. Creating a blog requires more time and effort.
Tweeting is two-way and interactive while blogging is mostly a one way broadcast.
People respond to Tweets and re-tweet them much more frequently than they comment or forward blog posts. This is due to the inherent design of the softwares.
Twitter is chaotic, but so is real life in which the human brain processes different information from people like collegues, family, friends and sorts them. Blogging has a structure that helps the reader more than the writer
People allocate a set amount of time for social media activities and personal branding. Now this may be elastic but not totally so. Hence the rise of twitter time in people’ lives would mean lesser time to read and write blogs.
To devise a more quantitative study, I gathered statistics from Technocrati’s State of the Blogosphere and added in WordPress stats.
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A chart of total WordPress.com blogs since launch:
Note new signups can be seen for WordPress.com here.
Fatigue could be a reason why Twitter is hotting up while Blogging sees steady state growth.
The following figure from Technocrati’s 2008 report sums it best.
But unfortunately I couldn’t compare June 2008 Blogging Frequency numbers with the 2007 report.
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It appears that blog posts got a boost with the 2008 elections so the current low traffic may simply be due to a lack of passionate issues in blogosphere. The rise in Twitter traffic is due in large measure to the creation of applications by third party providers and this trend has made Twitter the number three social media site.
Based on the data, it does not appear that Twitter has impacted blogging to a significant degree. Or, at least, it hasn’t yet. It is simply too early to say that Twitter is reducing blogging activity although there seem to be emperical trends along that line. 2009 could well be a tipping point
What about you? If you are a blogger, has your blog post frequency been affected by your tweeting activities.
