Facebook and Twitter are not destroying blogging

I just read one of the most ludicrous articles about the fate of blogging. Is Blogging Dead? claims that Facebook and Twitter are going to destroy the blogging industry. It claims that Facebook’s own blogging platform is going to completely replace Wordpress and Blogger sites. I’d like to take a few moments to discuss why this article was completely off base.

Many people don’t trust Facebook

Facebook has had a bad reputation for abusing the privacy of its users. No one can be sure how accurate this is. However, whether it’s accurate or not isn’t relevant. People are afraid to write anything on Facebook that they think may be tracked to them or sold to advertisers. They would rather use an independent blogging platform.

Facebook’s pages are not optimized for search engines

Facebook uses the no-index tag to keep search engines from reaching most (but not all) of its content. Even though Facebook is the second most trafficked site in the world, it doesn’t have an effective way to share information with the rest of the world. It is only a reliable way of communicating ideas with your own friends and hoping that it can go viral. However, Facebook bloggers have no control over how viral messages spread.

Most likely, the people who are really interested are the ones who are never going to have a chance to see them. This is why search engine optimization for blogs will always be a better to share niche ideas with strangers.

Twitter is not an effective way to communicate ideas

Twitter is great. But it can’t communicate ideas, it can only give brief snippets of them. It isn’t even be enough to share some titles on Twitter. Again, Twitters can’t control where their message goes when it goes viral.

It is almost impossible to monetize networking sites without a blog

You can’t sell anything directly on Twitter and it is against the terms of service to sell many services on Facebook as well. Even if you could, neither site really has an online payment system set up to make it possible. One of the biggest (or only) reasons people blog is to make money.

If anything, Facebook and Twitter have made blogs more popular by allowing bloggers to promote their ideas. Neither of these sites are setup to take the place of blogs. It is true that these sites are much more popular than an individual blog, which is why they are so valuable at driving traffic.