There are are a huge amount of ways to promote content online. When it comes to promoting them on social media, what platform should a marketer be concerned with, and which ones should they pass on?
Tumblr is such a social network that many people don’t really notice. Did you know that this particular platform is huge potential for SEO and social media marketing? Tumblr is great because of it’s power and simplicity.
Why Care About Tumblr?
Here are some stats about Tumblr that you may want to take into consideration:
130.5 million blogs on Tumblr, as of August 2013
28th highest traffic site on the web according to Comscore
300 million unique monthly visitors according to Yahoo
50% of Tumblr users are under the age of 25
53.5% of Tumblr visitors are female
Looking at this info, you can see that Tumblr has quite a following. This means that Tumblr is the largest hosted blog platform on the web. This is even compared to the 70 minion blogs that is hosted by WordPress.com. Based on the unique monthly visitors, it seems that 15% of all Internet users are making use of Tumblr. It seems that half of Tumblr’s user base are teenagers under the age of 25.
If you’re still unconvinced that Tumblr is all that important, keep in mind that many big brands have taken an interest in Tumblr. Yahoo purchased Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. Several of the world’s largest brands now have a presence on Tumblr.
Many of you are wondering, what IS Tumblr? To be straight forward, it combines many different kinds of sites into one package.
It seems that Tumblr allows for blogging functionality, such as WordPress, but also adds social features, such as following, sharing, hastags and liking, just like in Facebook. It even throws in a dash of Pintrest with a bit of spice. Tumblr has a single blog, instead of multiple boards.
Tumblr is a blog platform that utilizes built in social functionality and viral potential. This makes Tumblr one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web.
Tumblr’s Benefits
What are some of the benefits of using Tumblr when compared to other social networds and blogging platforms?
1. Dofollow Links
The links that come from Tumblr allow dofollow. Because Tumblr is a blogging platform, this means you’ll have total control over how your bogs, or tumblrogs, appears. This includes dofollow links on your site.
If you have a popular post on Tumblr, because of the service’s social sharing functionality, it will be reposted to many other tumblrogs. Becuase of the dofollows, each of these reblogs is a dofollow backlink to your original post. This is pretty great for getting your blogs to become even more well known!
Because of the highly active user community of Tumblr, it’s much easier to have your content go viral on Tumblr than on other social sites.
2. Great Content Discovery
Built right into Tumblr, you’ll find great content discovery, due to hashtags. In Tumblr, unlike Facebook, people are actively looking for hashtags for their content discovery. By using hashtags, it’s incredibly simple when finding that content you are searching for, even if your follower count is low.
It’s pretty easy to create new tumblrogs from scratch, and you can get dozens of reblogs for your content, despite the fact you have no followers. Unlike Facebook, Tumblr posts will get more love from other Tumblr users, even if they don’t follow you.
Tumblr: The Great Content Testing Ground
Content testing is another great use for the Tumblr platform. If you’re doing a lot of social media marketing, more than likely, you’ll have a ton of images that you would like posting to other sites, such as Facebook. Tumblr is a great way to test if your image is going to do good or not.
Like Twitter’s dashboard, the Tumblr dashboard is chronological. A big advantage is that you are able to put up more content at once to Tumblr than you would want to on Facebook. Since they can simply scroll right past it, Tumblr users are more forgiving.
This means that Tumblr is a great way to test your content and find out what content performs the best. Now that you’ve discovered what content works, you can then repost them to your other social media profiles. The extra benefit is that it’s possible the content you are producing on Tumblr will be found later on, all thanks to the hastag.
4. Microsites
Since Tumblr is the most popular platform for microblogging, it’s the ideal place for microsites. Sure, you won’t get the same amount of options and flexibility as you would with a WordPress blog, but tumblrogs are easy to set up, free, and easy to manage. You can even switch a tumblr.com subdomain to your own domain name with ease.
By creating microsites in Tumblr, you can build up a collection foweb properties with decent PageRank. If you are able to post high quality content on a regular basis, you can get your tumblrogs to PR2 – PR4 within a few months.
By creating microsites, you can create serious content for your main brand, all the while not associating directly with the memes and the other not so serious content that also does well on Tumblr.
5. Branding
Promoting your brand online is important. Luckily, Tumblr is a tool that will allow you to do just that. Tumblr will provide you with an opportunity to establish your web presence. Like with Twitter and Facebook, it gives you an extra outlet to engage your fans and potential customers. It also allows you to get your brand name out there. This can be especially important if you want to get a younger demographic to follow you.
Some Content Ideas To Use On Tumblr
To help give you some ideas to post on Tumblr, here are four types of content that can perform quite well on Tumblr:
1. Memes
2. Photos and Illustrations
3. Quotes
4. Animated GIFs
What’s funny is that even though Tumblr is one of the largest social media and blogging platforms out there, quite a few online marketers are ignoring it. Hopefully, after reading up on the benefits that Tumblr can give you, you may decide to use Tumblr as a viable way to get your content out to more people.