It was announced earlier this month by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams that Twitter now produce approximately 90 million tweets per day, 25% of which contain links to other content.
The complementary announcement that Twitter can bow boast over 145 million users also demonstrates the dramatic growth in member levels over the past few months.
With this in mind, alongside the knowledge that Facebook has over 500 million users, and accounts for 30 billion pieces of content shared per month (as of July 2010), it is blatantly obvious that the social media machine is performing at optimum levels.
In fact, an Ofcom study revealed that social networking activity equates to approximately 23% of all time spent online.
Despite this awe-inspiring domination of the online sphere, the role of blogging in today's digital climate remains highly significant.
Digital analysts eMarketer.
com believe that more than 50% of internet users will read blogs at least every month over the course of this year.
In their findings, they concluded that since 2008, blogging readership has steadily risen to over 100 million in 2009, and is expected to surpass the 50% mark this year.
It is believed that there are over 144 million blogs globally, with 1 million posts uploaded daily.
Though this is a sizeable figure, it represents only a fraction of the shared content capabilities of Facebook.
In the opinion of eMarketer.
com, the primary factors driving blog popularity are the ease of personal blogging platform usability, as well as the associations of familiarity and comfort which complement blog writing and reading based on the inherent human to human interaction involved.
This h2h interaction is evidently a major factor in social media exchanges as well.
In fact, one of the chief benefits of social networking is the excellent opportunities for not only content sharing, but product or business promotion.
Individuals respond far greater to friendly recommendations rather than a faceless call to action.
Alongside this lies the potential for advertisers to appeal to individuals via user-specific advertising on Facebook etc.
, the outcome of which results in a highly effective campaign of both search engine optimisation (SEO) and conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
Despite the upward trends in blogging, as a means of communication, expression, and content sharing, it cannot compete with the supremacy of social media.
Furthermore, with the ever-increasing significance of mobile internet access in the success of any online presence, blogging is likely to fall further behind.
It is believed that 1 in 4 web users in the UK access the social media via their mobile handsets, and whilst the brief and flippant nature of the Facebook or Twitter platform lends itself to mobile updating, the same cannot be said for the more lengthy and attention consuming process involved in blog reading and writing.