Is the Corporate Blog Still Content Marketing’s “Home Base”?

Arik Hanson

For years, what’s been beaten into our head?

Drive all social traffic back to our corporate blog and/or web site.

We own that content. We can drive leads on our site. We can track user behavior more accurately.

Drive all social traffic back to our corporate blog and/or web site.

And, for the most part, that’s been true. We have been doing that. And it’s been working.

Except here’s the thing: I’m not 100 percent sure that’s true anymore.

Hear me out. Let me give you an example.

Dave Kerpen is a agency owner and big-time influencer in the social space. If you’ve been online long, you know Dave’s been a fairly big deal for a long time. He’s owner of Likeable Local, a long-time influencer and now, a LinkedIn “Influencer.”

Dave’s business is social media and digital marketing consulting. B2B. Straight up. His company has a corporate blog. But, he doesn’t show up there much.

Where does he show up? LinkedIn. In a big way.

Dave blogs using LinkedIn’s publisher feature on a regular basis. He was part of the early “Influencer” program, so he had a big edge. But still–he’s out there posting on a regular basis. In fact, Dave’s made 184 posts on LinkedIn since he started writing there in January 2013.

And, his posts are getting big-time traction.

Take this post, for example, from March. As you can see, the post has generated more than 700,000 views, more than 4,000 like and more than 600 comments.

Those are big numbers. Numbers, I dare say, he wouldn’t get on his blog these days. And, more importantly, he’s reaching the RIGHT people. After all, LinkedIn is widely regarded as THE professional network. It’s full of people looking for jobs, tips and advice in the business world.

Now, Dave does include multiple links within each post back to the Likeable site. But, he’s choosing to post on LinkedIn–not his blog.

Another example: Medium. You know, the tool Ev Williams created as an ad-hoc blogging platform for those without a blog.

We continue to see people and brand posting here (including Periscope, which uses Medium as its blog, as far as I can tell).

For example, you probably remember Hank Green’s post from a couple months ago.

The angle: Green basically ripped Facebook’s engagement metrics for videos to shreds. It created quite the hub-bub among internet and social media types.

And he chose to publish it on Medium–not his personal site (YouTube, in this case, where he has more than 2 million subscribers).

The metrics weren’t all that crazy–2,000-plus recommendations, 2,000-plus likes. 80-plus comments.

But you know who one of the first people to comment on the post was? Facebook product manager, Matt Pakes.

So, clearly the post drew interest. Clearly, it made a mark. And again, he made it on Medium.

So, is this a trend just starting to break? Not sure.

It’s just something I’ve noticed lately. More people not publishing key pieces of content on their owned media properties–and instead, posting them on “rented land” like LinkedIn, Medium and Facebook.

Interesting, right?

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