Just read this article about how some business is “leaving Social Media”,  but when you read the article,  the guy says:

Q: Is your plan to stop completely on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?

Robert: Yes and no. I may pop in now and again to post something, but for my own amusement, not for business reasons. However, what we are going to do is continue to feed our blog posts into those social media platforms automatically. That way it’s not a drain on our time involving  doing things we hate to do, and is a struggle anyway. In other words, we are going to do what we can’t stand, which is to use social media as a broadcast one way mechanism to funnel people to our blogs or websites, where we will interact if asked. Similar to what Guy Kawasaki has done, albeit more openly.

Why Our Business is Leaving Social Media | Social Media Today

Okay,  so NO,  you’re not ”leaving”.  You blog,  so that’s one (and really the “original” platform for social media) bit of social media.  I don’t know why this is such a widespread misunderstanding.  I’ve seen other articles about how “blogs are now passé” and social media is taking over.  Baloney.  Blogs,  and their distribution system ,  RSS,  basically comprise the foundation upon which  all these other apps have been hatched and multiplying. 

For about 2 years,  I was hardly active at all on Twitter,  having not yet seen the usefulness of it.  I had never been much of a “text-er”,  and Twitter seemed to me to be simply a Web-based text messaging system.   It was when Twitter began to yield to me benefits similar to that of the RSS reader that I began to use it habitually.  I discovered it as another channel for discovering what my friends and subscribed-to authors were talking about.  I quickly began neglecting my Google Reader scanning and began relying solely on Twitter. 

I rather quickly discovered that tweeting notifications about my blog posts was a thing to do,  since many others had switched to Twitter clients to “scan” their news each day,  or each hour,  or constantly on their smart phones.  I began titling my Blog posts with the Twitter update in mind,  often including the @ if I wanted to make it more likely that the person behind the @account would see my post,  or even the hashtags  (which have become rather useless in most cases,  except where “event” tweets can be aggregated by using them)

I recently signed up on tumblr to see what all the hubub is about,  and didn’t see what the attraction was.  I then realized that maybe tumblr appeals to those who twitter users who did not have a blog,  giving them the additional character space that the 140 limit on Twitter had imposed.   I had taken my existing blog and hooked it to my newer twitter account,  and so tumblr is not the attraction for me.  

So,  tumblr ‘s success gives an indication of how the blog is still the underlying motivation for the “social broadcasting” we do;  we want to tell our friends or readers something,  and so we blog, tweet,  post a facebook update.  The urge to inform, amuse, reach out, socialize is the human impetus that drives social media (and the corresponding desire to receive, consume,  be informed,  keep in touch role we play as “receivers” of this input from our friends and favorite blogger/writers).