Business Blogging Set To Grow By 25% In Two Years

A new study from eMarketer estimates that 43% of US companies will be blogging by 2012. And that one third of US companies are currently blogging. No word on their level of engagement or activity, but interesting to hear about the study, given so much focus today on social networks.

eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna thinks, “Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not,”

To me that specific niche is developing content on a regular basis that helps to make their corporate website come alive for SEO, engagement with customers, and integrated social media marketing with a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I'd be interested to hear more about the methodology of the research, especially because eMarketer also gave a comparison chart of all the studies conducted on blogging in the last few years, and so many of the numbers don't agree. Though that's partly because the studies were measuring different groups of companies. For example the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth stuides measure the number of blogs in the Inc 500 and the Fortune 500.