Having a blog on Posterous (for about a year now) and being an exceptional fan of WordPress at the same time, i decided to write a very short comparison, or actually pros and cons of using both of them.
WordPress has been an amazing tool for many years and its developers make a great job making it even better from update to update, however recently the new platform Posterous started becoming enormously popular. We can find official blogs of Microsoft Store and Chevrolet on Posterous already! So what is this Posterous and what it has that WordPress doesn’t(and vice versa)?
WordPress is definitely the most popular blogging platform ever done. The study made by Royal.Pindom.com (in Jan 2009) shows that WordPress is the most-used platform among self-hosted blogs, however it is not as popular as Typed re the free blogging services.* and this is where Posterous found its niche, its opportunity…
Both WordPress and Posterous platforms, are free, however running a free Posterous blog you can fully customise it and make it look like really yours by using your own domain and your theme (what is still not available on WordPress based on wordpress.com). It’s also much easier and straightforward to use. Posterous is a first platform, which introduced posting via email. You can very easily add attachment to your email incl. photos and videos. If more photos are added, a nice gallery is created. You can also autopost your post to Flickr, Facebook or tweet about it, you can also sent videos to YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
When this email posting feature has been added, it enormously increased Posterous popularity. As a reply, WordPress started working on the same tool. Despite implementing it just a few months after its competitor did, the tool is not working as well as Posterous’s one and from usability point of view, it’s Posterous which wins this battle.
Just a few weeks after that, Posterous started a direct attack on WordPress with its “Wordpress import” addition allowing you to import your WordPress blog to Posterous platform for free along with an autopost to WordPress option. This alternative made even more people switch to Posterous. Therefore, in an effort to remind that WordPress can be just as flexible and e-mail-friendly as its rival, the company has released a Posterous importer for users who want to “graduate” from the mini-blogging site to “a full blog with the features, flexibility and reliability of WordPress.com” (as WordPress organisation wanted Posterous to be seen). However, in many people’s eyes, Posterous has already become not only a micro-blogging platform, as it started being used as groups products, email lists, photo streams, video channels, and much more.
To sum up, I absolutely like both platforms. In my opinion WordPress has been created for those, who want a professional blog/ website that can highly compete on Google SERP. Therefore, if choosing a platform for a company blog, I would definitely use WordPress (and self-hosted!)
Posterous however is a perfect solution for those, who are not very much focused on technical aspects of having a blog. It is ideal for non-corporate individuals who are focused on the content (what actually Google Loooves!). SEO limitations are still present on Posterous, so in this sense the countless plugins are a huge advantage of WordPress. After all, when (on purpose I didn’t use “if”) Posterous start working on SEO features, WordPress might have serious problems. Are we talking at a case of student surpassing the master here?
*(by blogging services I mean a free blog on subdomain based on these blog platforms so WordPress based on WordPress.com or Typead on Movable Type etc.)
