Why Your Brand Needs a Tumblr Presence
I love Tumblr. It’s the perfect modern blogging platform: built for posts shorter than, well, this one, but for content that’s longer than a 140-character tweet.
It’s got amazing social features, too. I follow an astonishing 350 Tumblr blogs personally, which provides me a nice constant feed of content. Tumblr’s great Dashboard provides me the ability to like or reblog (plus several other features) each post, like so:
Tumblr has quickly become a source of amazing rich media content: unique photos, videos and text snippets. It’s fast, fun and simple. In recent months many major news organizations and brands are using it to push out short updates and fascinating visuals. A few of my favorites:
- GE. One of the most ubiquitous consumer and industrial product manufacturers posting INCREDIBLE images of their manufacturing facilities. This sounds boring but it’s beyond fascinating.
- Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone syndicates content from their magazine, plus general news and cool images/videos throughout the week.
- Life Magazine. Life’s iconic photography translates beautifully to the Tumblr platform, as the staff explores their inexhaustible archive of photos.
- NPR Music. NPR has been killing it lately: instead of resigning their fate as a “dying” medium, this radio giant has embraced the online culture of podcasts, blogs, videos and social interaction.
So this sounds great, but why should your business or brand be using it?
First, the audience: it was announced a while back that Tumblr hosted more blogs than WordPress, the de facto standard in blogging. (Remember this post you’re reading right now? Yeah, brought to you by WordPress)
Just how many blogs is that? Well, here’s the details from Tumblr as of when this post was written:
Thirty. Five. Million. That’s a lot of content, and a LOT of people reading that content. As we discussed, users have incredibly simple access to reblog and share your content and things tend to quickly go viral. (Sigh, I can’t believe I wrote that)
In fact, if you’re really lucky (and creating some amazing content), you might end up on Tumblr’s great Radar feature. This simple image slot is viewed by those millions of Tumblr nerds each day, meaning a TON of traffic and visibility.
So that’s audience. Let’s talk about usability. From a complexity standpoint, Tumblr is easier to understand than IKEA instructions. Posting content couldn’t be simpler, and they have some amazing features baked in. Seriously, just tap one of these options and you have a simple platform to post and customize your content. It’s just as simple on a mobile device:
My feature has to be their Queue. I can’t say enough about it: with just a few button pushes, you can organize and arrange your content to automatically post a certain number of times per day and at certain times. Consistent content posting is key, and this tool can make your life simple: load up a week or two worth of content and let it ride. You can still drop in the odd post here and there if a major news event occurs, but the bulk of your posting is taken care of.
They’ve also got a killer API, which means you can integrate a lot of Tumblr’s great features right into your existing website. Honestly there’s so much more to discuss regarding Tumblr, but you can learn it as you go. If you’ve casually used the platform in the past, jump in. If you’ve never used it, sign up for an account today! Be sure you follow the Centresource Tumblr for some insight into our little world. Get to Tumbling!