If you haven’t considered adding Tumblr to your social media portfolio yet, my latest blog post offers seven reasons why it hits a “sweet spot” for established individual and organizational users, complementing and augmenting engagement on other platforms in unique and effective ways. Additional reasons are welcome.
Tumblr. Follow the world’s creators.
That’s how Tumblr presents itself. On its About page, it goes on to say:
Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML.
Although Tumblr is over five years old and has more than 70 million blogs, it’s still relatively unknown – and probably even less understood. I confess that my initial experiences with it weren’t positive, and I’m still trying to figure out its vibe (yes, it’s the kind of platform that has a “vibe”), but its potential value became clear once I started to work with it.
Because images seemed to predominate Tumblr content (or so we thought), we originally assumed it would be a good place to reshare some of the original content from our burgeoning Pinterest presence. With that in mind, SMinOrgs’s Assistant Community Manager (who is also our Pinterest maven), Marci Stewart, took the initiative to create an account. When I then went in to do some basic set up of the Denovati Tumblr page, I realized that Tumblr offered many more possibilities than we initially thought, and I decided to establish a full presence and commit to regular contributions.
There are seven main reasons Tumblr hits a “sweet spot” for SMinOrgs, which are listed below and described more fully in this post. Can you think of other reasons why Tumblr is worth adding to an individual’s or organization’s social media portfolio? We’d love to hear from you!
– Courtney Shelton Hunt
Tumblr…
- Is designed for multimedia sharing.
- Enables sharing of posts that are longer (and richer) than tweets and status updates, but not as long as regular blog posts.
- Allows for a better balance between personal and professional identities than other platforms.
- Provides a unique balance between flow and permanence.
- Blends subscription options, offering readers more flexibility.
- Facilitates differentiated sharing and resharing of content better than other platforms.
- Can serve as a great aggregator of content from other platforms.
I’m wondering how many government organizations use Tumblr. Eager to see those responses. Do you happen to know of any examples, Courtney?
Great question, Andrew. I haven’t really seen any, but I’m still trying to figure out who to follow (which Tumblr doesn’t make that easy). You can find the blogs categorized under Politics and Government here:
http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/politics
How do you drive traffic to your tumblr? If you’re going to be contributing regularly, how do you ensure that there is a growing audience for your posts?
Great question, Hannah. I’ve been creating “Today on Tumblr” posts that I share via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. We also cross link original images between Pinterest and Tumblr. Last week I sent out an email blast that highlighted our new engagement there, and later this week I’ll be sharing a Tumblr recap blog post to help promote our presence.
Ideally, I’d like get folks to subscribe to our tumblelog via RSS feed or email, since many of them aren’t likely to create their own Tumblr accounts. Occasional visits are good too, but my biggest focus is on getting them to opt in to receiving regular updates.
September 2, 2013: I updated the post to reflect our rebranding and to link to the most current version of the related SMART Blog post.