Blogging vs. podcasting: Which Is best for your business?

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Jan 6, 2017 / by
Blogging vs. podcasting: Which Is best for your business?

Blogging and podcasting are two excellent ways to get your business’ message out there and connect with your audience. But which is better for your business? Let’s take a look at the main differences and how to choose where to invest your efforts.

What is a podcast?

Despite having existed for over a decade, some people still don’t know what podcasts are. You can think of them as radio for the Internet, except you don’t listen live. They are ongoing audio shows that you can download and listen to on a computer or MP3 device whenever you like.

They are almost always free to listen to and do not necessarily need a lot of technical knowledge or equipment (besides a microphone) to produce, meaning that pretty much anyone with access to a computer and connection can make one. So, much like blogs, podcasts are a highly democratic medium, accessible to all. The biggest difference is their format, and each has their own advantages.

Advantages of podcasting

Of course it’s difficult to compare two forms of media by virtue of their essential differences, but there are some clear advantages to podcasting over blogging for diffusing the same kind of message.

An ipod and headphonesPodcasts are easy to consume and the potential environments and situations in which, as a listener, you can enjoy a podcast are much wider than for reading a blog post. The main point here is that you can listen to a podcast while doing something else, such as shopping, exercising in the gym, folding laundry, driving or sitting on a bus without getting motion sickness. Many of your customers will be more inclined to listen to a 20 minute podcast episode than they would be to spend the same amount of time reading a blog post.

They also give you longer access time to an audience. Due to exactly the fact that most people are not going to read an entire blog post, while they will happily listen to audio content on the same topic, you are getting much more extended access to your target audience and customer base by putting out a podcast. This means more opportunities to build your brand and the trust your listeners have in it.

Finally, it can’t be ignored that hearing a voice is much more personal experience than just reading text. Giving your audience the chance to listen to a podcast with a regular host or hosts and letting them get to know their personality through their voice is a great way to connect with them. For the listener, this can be a much more personal, even intimate, experience than reading a blog post.

Advantages of blogging

None of this is to say that blogging is obsolete: far from it. The written word online still has a lot of potential and there are some obvious upsides to blogging compared to podcasting.

For SEO purposes, blogging is still king. The value of a contextual links in text online cannot be denied, and is a fundamental part of having your site easy to find through relevant searches. Without this, no one would find your business in the first place!

What’s more, people understand blogging for the most part. It is an older and more established form of online media, and so you are likely to get a wider audience interested in your blog simply by the fact that they know what a blog is, rather than introducing them to a new concept and trying to change their media consumption habits, which is extremely difficult to do.

How to choose between the two?

Of course, you don’t have to make a hard decision between blogging and podcasting once and for all: you can of course do both simultaneously. Since podcasting can be significantly more time intensive, however, you may need to dedicate more resources to it. Your ability to keep up blogging to the same extent may therefore become limited. Even so, it is advisable to keep a blog along side your podcast that summarises the content of each podcast episode, as well as giving links to things mentioned during the episode itself.

Ultimately, whether to spend your time blogging or podcasting and which will be better for your business will depend on a variety of factors including (but not limited to) the audience you’re interacting with, the type of information you’re trying to convey and the level of intimacy you want to create. Similar is the choice between blogging and vlogging.


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