Is Tumblr Useful for Digital Marketing?
Back in May last year, Yahoo! announced that they’d be purchasing Tumblr for $1.1bn in cash. Often dismissed as a second-tier social network by modern marketers, it came as a surprise. Why did Yahoo! purchase Tumblr for such an extraordinary amount of money? How could they use it to expand their business? It became clear that with over 160 million blogs and 70 billion posts, Tumblr has quite an audience.
Despite this, there are a relatively small amount of major brands and organisations using Tumblr within their digital marketing strategy. According to recent research, out of the top 100 global brands using Facebook and Twitter, only just over 30 of them are using the platform. Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer recently said that “The average post on Tumblr gets reblogged about 14 times. The average sponsored post on Tumblr gets reblogged 10,000 times.” So with this incredible reach (albeit mostly paid), it’s interesting to see why more brands are not using its marketing capabilities.
Is Tumblr actually useful for digital marketing? Hypebeast mentioned in 2011 that “If a picture paints a thousand words, then Tumblr is the greatest story-telling medium available in the social space”. Here at Parallax, we’re big fans of Tumblr. Let’s take a look at how you could potentially use it and why so many brands are missing out.
Learn about how you can use it
First things first, get to know what Tumblr can actually do. Tumblr gives you the freedom to share and produce content across a variety of different formats. Think text, video, images, quotes, links, GIFs, and audio clips; it’s pretty cool.
It’s really important to delve into the Tumblr world and get an understanding of how the current users act on the platform. Don’t dive right in there and start spamming members with all of your products, it won’t end well.
Understand the community
Tumblr users have quite a unique way of communicating. From bizarre GIFs and infamous hyperbolic language, to specific Tumblr domains that are recognisable across the website. Spend some time searching around and get a real understanding of the users. Look at the use of hashtags as well – they’re one of the main ways that content is organised and filtered on Tumblr. Whilst some are curated by the Tumblr team, the majority are created by the community.
Be visual
The most important thing to do when you’re using Tumblr is to use as many visuals as possible. You’ll find out very quickly that visual content gains the most traction on Tumblr gathering the most reblogs and notes. By visual, we mean use powerful imagery, graphics, and we’ve mentioned previously, the almighty GIF. Fashion, style and travel blogs tend to dominate Tumblr due to their amazing assets – Hypebeast in particular have done incredibly at growing their page organically due to the fantastic visual content that they post.
Try to become a leader in your industry on Tumblr. Create and share fantastic visuals that grab users as soon as they see it, making them instantly want to share. Try some competitions too – ask them to create GIFs or repurpose your own content to win something unique.
The great thing about Tumblr is that it provides a greater level of longevity for your content; reblogging allows your older content to be continually shared across the network. Previous research has shown that of all the existing Tumblr reblogs, 29% were from posts that were over 30 days old. Take that statistic in comparison to Twitter where popular tweets that are more than a couple of hours old usually disappear into the depths of social media and are not seen again.
Learn from the best
Take inspiration from some of the great brands out there. Known as a brand that tends to shy away from social media, Apple launched an unexpected Tumblr page several months ago to promote their range of iPhone 5c products. Using fantastic moving visuals, they’ve used Tumblr to target younger, ‘cooler’ social media users that are less mainstream. Check out the Coca-Cola Tumblr page too , they’re using incredible imagery that features classic marketing material and GIFs from all across the world.
The perfect storytelling platform
Tumblr really does provide the perfect platform for storytelling for brands. Whether using it to subtly promote a product range, inform fans of what’s happening, or to just generally post engaging content, it’s perfect.
Recently, Tumblr have started to support brands that are wanting to get on board with using the website as a marketing channel. From the recruitment of a Brand and Strategy team, to the launch of their Marketr Tumblr hub, they’re covering all bases. Over on the Tumblr business page, they offer specific tips for brands starting out so it’s worth having a read.
It was this year where Tumblr really became appealing to brands and businesses. With the introduction of their sponsored posts program, powered by Yahoo! advertising, brands could really push their content further into the Tumblr world. This allowed brands to pay for their content to appear in user timelines as ‘Spotlight’ posts, as well as ‘Radar’ posts which appear in the right hand side of a user’s dashboard. Forbes recently noted that both of these sponsored posts generate a whopping 120 million impressions per day.
Love it or hate it, Tumblr is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Use it effectively and there is every possibility that it could create a whole host of opportunities for your brand and become an integral piece of your digital marketing strategy.
Do you use Tumblr already? Get in touch, we’d love to see how you use it.