Jon Sobel of Technorati has published the latest State of the Blogosphere Report for 2010 including stats from 7,200 blogger respondents world-wide. Started in 2004 by Dave Sifry, this annual report has provided insight into the growth of the blogging community and helps answer questions like: who is blogging, why, what are they blogging about, how often and where are they blogging from.
In 2008 Technorati added insights of individual bloggers to the report with an emphasis this year on women blogging. As a long time blogger and advocate of blogging for online marketing, I’ve always taken a lot of interest and insight from these reports.
For marketers and communications professionals seeking to better understand the changing nature of the social web and the role blogs pay within in it, here are some essential statistics from Days 1 & 2 (of 3) from the 2010 State of the Blogosphere Report:
1% of respondents blog full time and 21% blog for their own company or organization
2/3 of bloggers are male and 1/4 of bloggers have a household income of $100k or more
U.S. States with the highest concentration of bloggers: California (15%), New York (8%), Texas: (6%), Florida: (4%), Illinois (4%)
Most Bloggers update 2-3 times per week
33% of bloggers have worked as a writer, reporter, producer or on-air personality within traditional media
42% of respondents say they blog about brands they love or hate
34% of bloggers say they never talk about brands on their blog
25% of Bloggers blog from their smartphone
42% of bloggers use social media to follow brands
The primary influences on the topics covered are other blogs (25%) friends (16%) news websites (9%)
Bloggers spend more time on social media sites (9.9% computer 5.7% smart phone) each week than they do reading other blogs (9.2% computer 3% smart phone)
The Top 100 bloggers generate almost 500 times the articles as all bloggers
Facebook (49.7%) is more popular than blogs (47.1) as a top influencer of consumer purchases
For consumers, 46.1% trust traditional media less than they did 5 years ago and 36.7% think newspapers will not survive in the next 10 years
Conversely, 39% believe more people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs than traditional media in the next 5 years
28.2% believe Facebook is being taken more seriously as a source of information
Consumers trust friends/family (89.3%) and traditional media more than social media as sources of information
More consumers trust friends on Facebook (51.8%) than blogs (45.6) as a trusted information source
The top success measurements bloggers use are:
- personal satisfaction (66%)
- quantity of posts/comments (51%)
- unique visitors (50%)
- links from other sites (39%)
- blog content shared on social sites (34%)
The top ways blogging has helped individuals with a business are:
- greater industry visibility (64%)
- acquired new customers, made sales (58%)
- built thought leadership (54%)
- asked to speak at conferences (32%)
- helped recruit employees (17%)
78% of bloggers surveyed are using Twitter with the most common purpose being to promote blog content (72%) and share links to interesting content (62%)
87% of bloggers surveyed use Facebook, and the majority (66%) do not have a page for their blog separate from their personal account
The most effective social media sites to promote blog content are Facebook (28%) and Twitter (26%) followed by LinkedIn (4%) StumbleUpon (3) Flickr (2) and YouTube (2)
The most common tactics mom bloggers use to promote their blogs include:
- commenting on other blogs (and hoping for reciprocity)
- tagging blog posts
- linking to other blogs from a blogroll
Obviously there’s a lot more data in Technorati’s full State of the Blogosphere report and more information will be published in part 3. Hopefully you’ll find some of these initial statistics useful for your own blogging efforts.
Parting Question:
Do you agree with the stats above. Do your own blog marketing activities or preferences sync up with bloggers overall or will mom bloggers?
