Make belief – The official blog of Renaissance Creative

Two weeks ago I was a visiting lecturer at my alma mater, Central Michigan University. Over the course of three days, I spoke to about 16 different classes. It was an exhausting experience, but I also learned a lot in the process.

I talked a lot about Facebook, Twitter and foursquare during my lectures. However one lecture seemed to focus largely on blogs. The class I spoke to had a very (in my opinion) extreme view about the value and long-term value of blogging.

One student suggested that people no longer have the attention span for blogs; that anything beyond 140-characters is more than many can handle.

I countered by suggesting that while personal, Here’s-What-I-Did-Today blogging may be falling by the wayside, corporate blogging is experiencing a major surge.

While having a dynamic web site is something most businesses should have, if you’re a small company just starting out, it might look more like an additional expense than a genuine resource.

For companies facing that decision, let me remind you that while Facebook is at its heart a social platform, it also serves all of the same functions as a very basic web site.

If your company trying to develop a web presence in the most cost-effective way possible, consider taking the amount you would have spent on a web site and apply it towards developing your business’s Facebook profile.

Here’s why:

You’ve got a Facebook profile, claimed your business on Google Maps and Foursquare, and you may even have a Twitter account. So far, your businesses is well situated to use the internet and social platforms to generate business and raise awareness of your brand.

But there is one other platform where your business is absent: Blogs.

The natural inclination of businesses is that blogs are time-consuming and labor-intensive. I won’t dispute that — blog posts require time and effort to write and publish.

But the benefits to maintaining a company blog are considerable. Consider the following: