Understanding Blog, Vlog, Micro-blog

Before becoming a vlogger and an active social media user, I was a fan of blogging where I posted my literary articles, and new stories. To have a published article on the web where people from around the world can see it is already a great accomplishment to me. On the other hand, because of the trend of social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter now a day, I have shifted my interest in to these platforms.

Blogging in Social Media Age

I have learned this week in our readings in our class in Social Media Marketing at BYU-Idaho Online through BYU Pathway Worldwide the importance of blogging in spite the popularity of social media. Yes. Blogging is an important piece of an effective social media campaign. With blogs, you can show to your audiences different pieces of contents like photos, videos, graphics, audios, other than the articles as main content. This means that with blogs, you have control over your content compare to social  media which you are "renting space" for your content. 

Social media platforms decide what you can post, how you post it, and what type of content you can post. With blogs, you have a lot of liberty over your content. People can be able to read your content in a single page. At the same time blog is stable and secured platform to post and keep your contents over-time. According to The Purpose Blog, "blogs are essential in the digital ecosystem because it’s one of the main sources of the very thing that keeps the internet alive—content." This is the main reason blogging to me is an effective piece of social media campaign.

Though I consider blogging as an effective way for marketing, I can not set aside the fact that social media is also useful and effective in its unique way. Social Media is useful for immediate campaign and for collecting trends to be used for blogging or writing an article.

Though it was not discussed in our topic, I want to take this opportunity to also share my understanding about the variations of blogging in this social media age. I would like to discuss blog, vlog, and micro-blogging and incorporating my experiences with them.

Blogging My Literary Works

It has been six years now when I started blogging my literary articles in our native language. I consider that by doing so, I can help preserved our language of our province. I have noticed that there are more and more youth in our province that don't speak our mother tongue or don't know how to speak or use some words correctly. They don't know how to spell it. 

In my blog site Aklanon Proud, you can find literary articles like poems, stories, and feature stories mostly written in Aklanon. 

I also blog news. I started doing this when I started working as a broadcast journalist locally. I created Energy FM Kalibo, Aklan News Update, and Radyo Birada blog sites. I also started blogging updates in our local church at Tangalan LDS News. Its a good thing that until know I can search and be able to read articles I have written even though some of this sites are already inactive. I understand that they are not perfect but I am happy how I was able to express my talent in writing and my creativity through these blogs.

Social Media as Micro-blogging Platforms

I have been using social media to share my thoughts and experiences but I also found social media as an avenue to share my articles from my blog site so many people can visit it and see my works. To me, not only that social media serve as platforms for me to share my blogs but at the same time, I consider Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as good ways to share short blogs or micro-blogs.

"A microblog is a short piece of content designed for quick audience interactions," says Sprout Social

"Microblogging is a combination of instant messaging and content production. With a microblog, you share short messages with an online audience to improve engagement. Social channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest offer popular platforms for microblogging," it added.

What I did was, I created Facebook pages to compliment my blog sites where I can share my blogs in there at the same time can post directly on my social media pages for quick updates and random thoughts which can be collected later on for writing my next blog. Social media is also useful to collect insights and contributions directly from my audiences.

Blogging vs. Vlogging

"A blog is a website that contains written events, stories, topics, etc. On the other hand, a vlog is similar to a blog, however, the latter contains video content instead of written content," according to Profile Tree.

An example of a vlog platform is YouTube which I am also venturing on. 

Here is an example of my vlog featuring our life in a village. This is one of my first video posted in YouTube.

Conclusion

To me blogging is still useful in time of social media. As a content creator or a digital marketer, you should leverage these platforms to increase your reach and your earnings.