You may have seen some of our recent posts about how your business can use social media to promote your products and services, and this week we want to give you some insight on Tumblr. It is arguably the hardest platform to use, and it depends on how much time you allow to social media as to how many platforms you use, however it really could be worth the investment of your time when you realise there are 254.6 million tumblr blogs online and 120.2 billion posts, 56% of the services 25.2 million monthly visitors are under 34, so if this is your target demographic it could be well worth looking into the platform! (Information from the Tumblr website.)
Tumblr is a rather stand alone social media platform, it allows you to post photos, text posts, videos, audio posts, music and many more miscellaneous posts. Users blogs are fully customisable and they can even alter their HTML, which means every tumblr page is very different and individual- they aren't set to the 'profile picture' and 'header' as the only customisable aspect of their page as on other social media platforms. Tumblr is available in 16 languages, showing its global reach- and also highlighting the potential to show your products to a worldwide market. Tumblr is not only a social media platform, but also a multimedia microblogging platform, whilst you can post status' and interact with other users, you are also not constrained to only write within 140 characters or post short videos as on other platforms. You can post what you want, reblog and like anything, and on Tumblr, posts can be shared relatively quickly to go viral. You can see at the bottom of a post how many 'notes' a post has- these are the amount of interactions a post has, from likes, comments, and reblogs- the more notes a post has the more popular it therefore has been.
Similar to other blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger, you can post straight away, or schedule for another time, which makes it easy to schedule posts for the on coming week for example, meaning you don't have to keep up with your account throughout the week but you still have content uploading. Unlike other platforms, Tumblr will post them for you, you schedule them by posting them into your queue and say how many posts you want per day whilst you yourself are inactive- your page will therefore read, 'Automatically publish a queued post ___ times a day between 12am and 12am.' You can even change the time frames to suit your target audience by posting when you know the majority will be online.
Starbucks host a tumblr page for their popular Frappuccino beverages which are a popular tumblr post. They have moving gifs, and photos of their drinks- the moving gif below recieved 6230 notes, showing how high engagement can be when you market your product right on the site- be fun, creative, and think outside of the box and people will engage with it! Starbucks in particular seems to post seasonally too- during the summer months you can see how their drinks were photographed outside in bright, summer locations such as the beach or pool, now moving into more autumnal weather we can see them surrounded by pumpkins or near fires showing how they keep relevant all year round.
Businesses are welcome on Tumblr, they allow sponsored posts, where adverts look like regular Tumblr posts, but are far more visible, and are 'targetable by gender, location, and interest. And can be syndicated to Yahoo for added reach' (According to the Tumblr business homepage.) This does give a huge boost in the engagement of your posts, but does require an investment of capital as would an advertisement on any other social media platform. Brands also have the option to use sponsored video posts where they can see the analytics of engagement of their video, when a consumer scrolls, the video will automatically play, and is deemed to be more eye catching than a photo post. Examples of the types of brands using these advert is a broad range- from luxury clothes labels, to MasterCard who launched a campaign 'One More Day' to encourage workers to travel and spend time with family and loved ones as they realised according to the US Travel Association, 429 million vacation days went unused in 2013.
You can see full examples of campaigns and their engagement statistics online here to see how businesses such as 'Visit Britain' use Tumblr to their advantage.
Tumblr isn't a platform for every brand and business. If your target audience is over 25, there is a lesser chance of them being a Tumblr user. Small businesses especially need to consider their ROI, a business does not have to join every social media channel to be successful. Our main tip to you would be to research the various platforms, view how they market their products, their demographics, and the pros and cons of investing your time and money into them- they all have their drawbacks. However, some businesses host their entire blog on the platform, or use it for showing off photography and descriptions of their posts, hoping to get notes on it. It's a great platform to use for building engagements on adverts if you are able to pay for them, and is a superb platform to gather everything you post on other platforms of social media- text from Facebook, short information and links on Twitter, and photos or short videos on Instagram, and post them all on one blog which is reachable by millions of people. It can be a stand alone social media platform for you, or could be a way to culminate all your content on one page, and expand on this- for example, you post your 140 character tweet regarding a topic, then go to Tumblr to explain your full opinion giving examples and references.
