Social or Blogging? What's my best bet in terms of marketing and brand impact...?

Since the dawn of social media, there has been an argument amongst marketing experts as to whether social or blogging is more important for a company to focus on. If you're anything like us, we have periods of time that are so insanely busy, it's hard to make time for either! (shout-out to our most recent digest subscribers, for the lowly single blog post we managed to find time for last month.. we'll do better, we promise!)


There are pros and cons to both, of course, but really it is about finding the balancing of effort across both blogging and social media to maximize your reach and engagement for your specific customer base.

Social Media

Pros:

1. It's fast and easy. Twitter, Facebook, Google + etc. are all geared towards making it as easy and quick as possible to create content.
2. The traffic is already there. You have a ton of eyes on Facebook and Twitter, so getting your content in front of your audience is less of a challenge than with blogging.

Cons:

1. You're on someone else's turf. You're adding content, traffic, and clicks to a site that does not necessarily directly benefit you. But Zuck will definitely thank you for the extra ad money!
2. There are a lot of distractions when one is on a social media platform- the information overload is a real thing, and you're competing with a bunch of different click-bait articles and posts, to get someone's attention.
3. Social has no long-lasting benefits to your brand. On most platforms, once your content passes through a user's feed it is lost to them forever.
    

Blogging

Pros:

1. Blogs are forever-- once you've posted a blog, you can keep sending people back to it forever. Social posts tend to be very temporary, and less likely to get eyes as time passes, whereas if folks are on your blog, they will likely be browsing your entries while there.
2. Blogs increase your SEO and traffic, just by existing. Pertinent blogs will improve where you rank on Google/Bing for specific keywords, and increase the likelihood that people will end up on your site.
3. Blogs are generally hosted on your own site, or at least very closely linked. You're keeping someone within your personal web presence when you've got them on your blog- the branding, targeted marketing, everything... you control that experience since it's not on someone else's platform.

Cons:

1. They take more time - Let's be real, writing a tweet takes about a minute. Writing a blog can (and should) often involve research, writing, editing, peer review, etc... it's much more of a time investment.
2. It's harder to get eyes than on social. As mentioned above, social media has the built in audience-- on your blog, you need to build domain authority and search rank to be found in competitive key terms, or entice people to get there from some other platform.

In conclusion, there are pros and cons to both, obviously. And for the biggest impact, social and blogging should be used in a symbiotic manner to try to drive and convert the most traffic possible. At Tragic, we like to use social to keep up with daily news and industry updates, as well as advertise our blog posts when we publish them. We try to publish a blog twice a week- sometimes less (when it's crazy busy), and sometime more when we have super awesome and exciting updates and blogs need to be written! A healthy balance between the two has been proven to provide the biggest impact. Developing a consistent strategy that works best for your audience will take some time and tweaking, but if you pay attention to your traffic and user engagement you will be able to create a system that best benefits your brand.