That's what Twitter does... Hyperconnects you

“We are social” is a “conversation” agency with clients like Skype, Ford or WWE. Recently, they published a blog post in which they say blogging is being killer by Twitter. This hypothesis is actually stupid. I know Twitter registered a 2,681% growth in the last 12 month, as eMarketer reported, but that doesn’t mean blogs are going down.

Don’t be limited!

The heading above should have been “Twitter limits your expression“, which is true. In 140 characters, you can only say one or two ideas. Expressing is limited to that maximum number of characters. Thinking that you can replace 400 to 700 words (the medium length of a blog post) makes you a limited person with a limited thinking.

A couple of years back, there was this trend: “Blogs are killing media“. False. Blogs didn’t kill the media. Because you can’t compare a full team of journalists, a whole team of professionals, with one man writing on a blog. It’s true bloggers addopted some of the basic rules of journalism, but it’s normal. When seeking for credibility, you have to show people that they can trust you. That means the info you publish must be accurate, your articles should be clean and readable, you need sources and confirmations.

The “complementary” concept

One of the trends in classic media, a couple of years ago, was to create blogs. Something like “Fight fire with fire“. The difference between newspapers’ blogs and regular blogs is that usually the first ones are written by experts. Or maybe not experts, but people that really know and understand markets or topics they write about. That transformed the blogs and the “Fight fire with fire” concept was addopted by bloggers just as well. Bloggers learned more about their niche and they became small experts.

Newspapers’ blogs became complementary to the actual newspaper. “We give you the news, the information, why not read our opinions too?“. That’s what Twitter means to bloggers right now: “I have the news, here it is! But be sure you visit my blog to see a full analysis on this subject or to read more details“.

After all, what’s Twitter?

Just like newspapers, TV stations, news websites or blogs, Twitter is a medium. Twitter is where you can find news. The advantage of Twitter is that this medium is really fast. The disadvantage is that your news gets lost just as fast between the other’s news. Someone who doesn’t follow your stream might never find out your info.

Twitter can’t beat blogs just as blogs can’t beat classic media. As long as Twitter limits your expression to 140 characters, it will not beat blogs. As long as blog posts have at least one percent personal opinion, they won’t beat classic media. It’s that simple. People have a need for professionalism. I’m not saying someone on Twitter is not professional. But Twitter can’t afford to sustain professional information, unless a tweet links to an article.

Let’s just stick to using Twitter as a complement to our blogs, OK? Tweets don’t (yet, at least) have the same impact as blog articles. And you just can’t explain a whole concept in 140 characters. If you want a better explanation of what I’m trying to say, here’s one from Chris Brogan:

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

Read the full article on his blog, it’s pretty short, actually. And here’s another good article by Copyblogger’s Brian Clark – “Blogging is dead (again)“. And there’s this article in The Guardian, signed by Charles Arthur, who says “The long tail of blogging is dying“. I’d add that this is good: blogs are heading to niches, which is actually great. And while the growth tends to go negative, that means will read less crap. Isn’t that cool?