In the age of social media and the metaverse, the role and importance of textual content seem to have suddenly plunged into oblivion, overwhelmed by the power of visual communication and the dominance of image, which together with video continues to dominate content marketing strategies for companies and professionals, but also for all those ordinary people who would like to increase the effectiveness of social media profiles on Instagram or Facebook.
The downsizing of the written word can be explained in two ways, looking for its reasons in some practical facts and in a kind of trend that has now become absolutely dominant. The first, more materialistic reason is related first of all to the drastic decline in the sales of printed books and newspapers, which in some countries are reaching incredibly low levels. People are no longer reading, or almost no longer reading.
Most of them, in order to inform themselves, resort to the convenience of the Internet, to the articles published online on newspapers’ websites (and not only on those), thus preferring to take advantage of the immediacy and speed of the Net to glean all the information about a given fact or topical subject.
New content
This habit has not only alienated people from a certain kind of content, namely productions written for traditional newspapers (or books), but has also exposed them to the risk of becoming overly familiar with everything that is routinely published online, even on the sites of major national newspapers, where the quality of the text and its complexity are significantly lower than any other content published in print.
Getting used to the consumption of these kinds of articles, which are often full of inaccuracies and incredible grammatical errors, people have ended up convincing themselves that nowadays, on the web and social media, the only kind of written content worthy of consideration is that which is short, concise and extremely simple, of an almost elementary level, easily assimilated by anyone under any circumstances, even while on the subway, on the train or walking in some city.
The written word is now in the midst of a crisis also because of a second reason, of a much less concrete nature than the first and more related to the new features of the web and online communication.
The role of the algorithm
The need to create content from an SEO perspective, in order to improve the ranking of the site or blog in search engine results, has forced professionals and companies to create texts that are almost unreadable, dense with repetition and lexical jarring of various kinds, inserted with the sole purpose of increasing the number of keywords in various places in the text and increasing the chances that that particular content will be found more easily, including through better ranking in Google searches.
The algorithm, in a sense, has killed the beauty and complexity of written texts, putting quantitative factors before qualitative ones and causing people to turn more and more toward different, more immediate, and seemingly even more pleasing content, such as videos or photographs. In this situation, even thinking about starting a corporate blog would seem like a great waste of time, if not downright folly.
And yet, at this complex historical juncture, the blog represents one of the last bastions of the written word, an impregnable stronghold that continues to resist the assaults launched by new web trends, and is amazingly succeeding. Indeed, for certain companies, blog content represents an indispensable added value to enrich their business offerings, even more, embellishing them with guides and insights dedicated to some specific industry topic.
This content, appropriately shared on social media such as LinkedIn, could also help the brand strengthen its reputation and unearth new business opportunities, perhaps by connecting with other professionals or prospective employees.
It is not necessary for a brand’s content strategy to rely completely on the blog and its written content. These publications serve more to complement an already high-quality offer, making it even more attractive in the eyes of its consumers including future ones.
Those who have already taken full advantage of this strategy are certainly the online gambling industry, which for some time now has been devoting large sections of its sites to expert advice and reviews focusing on the casino games and betting sites offered by the platform. One of these is undoubtedly Asiabet, which offers all its users a rich catalog of betting sites and online casinos to try out easily and safely, also helping them concretely with useful guides focused on the specific features of each game. In addition, the site targets Asian customers by presenting them with a list of gambling sites in their native language.
The game between the written word and the algorithm, nowadays, is played mostly on blogs, and the outcome seems more uncertain than ever.