tumblr teachings

Tumblr, created in 2007, is a microblogging platform and social networking website now owned by Yahoo!. Tumblr hosts over 290 million blogs and has over 555 million monthly visitors according to wikipedia.com. Tumblr is a popular media for teens and college aged students with most users under 25 years old. Users on the site follow others and see those blog posting on their dashboard.  Users are able to tag their postings and queue them for future postings.  Tumblr allows users to post images, gifs, links, chats, quotes, text, videos, and audio as well as send chat messages to one another privately.

For businesses, the best way to get your content in front of the users is through sponsored posts.  While businesses and brands can generate their own content, users have to follow these businesses to see the post or follow someone who has reposted the content.  With a sponsored post, the video or image will appear for a large portion of users without them following the company. Tumblr also provides a lot of data back to the companies to assist in their marketing including analytics and case studies.

As a user of Tumblr, I very rarely follow big businesses such as Coca-Cola or similar.  Most of the blogs I follow are random people who share a common interest with me such as theatre, cross stitching, favorite television shows, political movements I am interested in, similar health issues, grad school students, librarians, people I know, and other random ones.  The businesses I follow would include companies like Buzzfeed, NPR, the National Park Services, Broadway.com, some Etsy shop owners, and some television shows run by the actual company like Food Network.

Most of the businesses that I follow are pushing content from their home websites onto tumblr. For example, NPR often posts article thumbnail and headlines as their tumblr posts.  On occasion they will post longer content such as the entire article with pictures or reblog what someone else has written with an added comment.  For some businesses this is the best use of tumblr.  For bigger businesses with money it is better to buy the sponsorship and have more direct advertising.  For example, Game of War which has a short video of the game being advertised as a sponsored post. Some companies like Nike or Starbucks will even do a Sponsored Day where they are the only sponsored ad that will come up on tumblr that day.

The trick for the businesses is to generate content that is interesting enough that someone will want to reblog.  If a post is reblogged it will stay on that user's blog until deleted, which creates a catch-22.  Content must be able to last a long time as it could be reblogged around the internet for months if not years.  If your company posts about a specific product and provides a link and that gets reblogged for months, the consumer will want to be able to click the link and still buy the product not find a dead end or no webpage. You don't want to make potential customers upset by not having working links.

Personally, I try to keep my dashboard free from "purchase me" postings and stick to the companies that are generating interesting content such as news articles or stunning photos.  Often I will even unfollow others if they begin posting too much about "buy this" or "buy that." But I could be far from the norm as I am an older user to the site and maybe those younger than me really are using tumblr to purchase products.  For larger companies that can afford the sponsored posts, it is a great way to keep the name in front of an audience since it cannot be deleted just scrolled past. For individuals looking for a quick and easy blogging site mostly made up of photos, tumblr is something you should check out. For businesses, I am not sold it is something worth the time and money for marketing your product, perhaps just keeping your brand in a positive light.