Unit 14: How Social Media Differs from Blogging

Introduction:

People often confuse the concepts of social media, blogging, and microblogging. Let’s take a look at each of these to understand the difference.

Blogging

By now you will be quite familiar with the concept of blogging, but let’s look at the definition of blogging to better reinforce the idea.

Blogging constitutes writing longer, meaningful articles or posts that have value to readers. The size of a blog post is often similar to that of a newspaper article. Images, video, audio, surveys, interactivity, or animation may be used with the post to help get its point across. Good blog posts are well researched and have references, citations, or links to support their assertions or to better demonstrate a particular point.

Blog posts are organized into categories and are archived for future reading.

Social Media

Social Media is built around networks of friends and the direct sharing of information, links, and media between these networks. One of these items that is often shared is a status update. Status updates are quite brief and are often opinionated or comical in nature. Because of their brief nature, statuses are often updated several times a day.

Microblogging

Microblogging falls somewhere between blogging and social media. Like blogs, microblogs aim for more credibility and readership, but they are often quite brief and somewhat less researched. Below is a breakdown of some microblogging platforms and what they are useful for.

Some examples of microblogs are:

In creating and developing your blog, it is a common temptation to get lazy or tired of posting meaningful, well-researched articles and descend either into microblogging or social media style updates, just to maintain posting frequency.

However, as soon as you start doing this, your readers will sense your laziness and your blog will start to get a microblogging type of feel. Your blog and your articles will quickly lose their value and you will lose your readers.

Graded Assignments

Unit 14

Choose a particular topic and write about it in three different ways:

  1. as if intended for a social media status update,
  2. for a microblog, and
  3. for a regular blog.

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