Using these 5 measurements in relation to how information is used to promote your brand on each Social Media platform (including blogs) allows us to organise and understand our Japanese Social Media activity more effectively.
1. Freshness
Is it a live or archived information?
2. Openness
Is the information open to the public or closed?
3. How it’s shared
Is it shared on the ‘Interest graph’ or ‘Social graph’?
Previously I’ve described about the relationship between these two graphs. Just to give you a heads up, ‘Interest graph’ means Social Media platforms that are publicly open and users connect each other through interests, like Twitter and Facebook. Whereas Mixi is a more of a closed community where friends connect with real life friends and families, and is often referred to as the ‘Social axis’ in the Japanese Social Media field.
4. How it spreads
Is it a wide spread viral type or long tailed archive type?
5. How it’s obtained
Are users actively looking for it or are users’ friends bringing it to them?
Blogs — 5 measurements applied
Let’s take a look at each platform with these 5 measurements applied. The first one we can look at is blogs.
1. Freshness
Blogs archive information and not necessarily the latest information.
2. Openness
Blogs are open media, and anyone on the Internet can access them. This openess also means it’s a good for search engine rankings, as they trawl through websites. Any keywords bloggers write will remain for search engines to find unless the page gets deleted or altered.
3 & 5. How it’s shared & obtained
The main source of traffic for blogs is search engines. The open nature of blogs allows them to be found by keywords. If a blog contains many different topics, search engine users may also be able to find some unexpected information. Saying this though, despite blogs being actively searched for, they can often be hard to be found unless marketing is carried out on different platforms.
4. How it spreads
Blogs aren’t so strong in spreading buzz on their own. Blogs can come into their own when combined with other Social Media platforms that have a powerful spreading nature such as Twitter and Facebook. Relying only on links and search engines to get traffic might not be the best way to spread the buzz anymore.
Whilst bloggers can blog about pretty much anything, they often want to write about the brands and businesses, blogs are also popular among businesses and brands. Popular ones in Japan include Shacho (CEO) blogs, Marketing/PR blogs and blogs run by branches of a larger corporations.
In the next post, we’ll be taking a look at Twitter and Facebook (and a little bit of Mixi)!
Thanks,
Kana & The JAPAN BUZZ