Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With 105 million blogs and 49 billion posts, Tumblr, the free blog hosting and social networking site, is the 32ndmost popular site in the world. So if you’re not using Tumblr as part of your marketing efforts, you’re missing a very large boat.

“Tumblr isn’t a blog platform like WordPress; it’s a social network that has a blogging platform.” says Neil Patel, co-founder of the Web analytics firm KISSmetrics. “The beautiful thing about Tumblr is that it makes it really easy to share your content with millions of Tumblr users… so you can get a big audience without spending a ton of money on marketing.” Here are Neil’s tips for marketing your business on Tumblr....

Has Tumblr become a part of your corporate publishing strategy? At one point, as Twitter and Facebook took off, it seemed that this “blog-network” platform (my term for something that isn’t as full-featured as WordPress or other software but definitely more feature-filled than a true social network) was going to be overshadowed by those ascendant networks.

But in the last year or so Tumblr has staged a remarkable comeback, despite – maybe even because of – a handful of direct competitors that sought to fill the “just let me post something quickly to my friends” space.

comScore recently released a study showing total unique visitors to Tumblr.com have grown significantly in the last year while the growth on mobile, which is a big way people consume and interact with those they follow, has grown even more sharply. And the number of clicks to Tumblr sites that are happening through search is even greater....

[Integrating Tumblr into your social media strategies can pay off - JD]

...diving into Tumblr can be a bit intimidating. To help you leverage this social networking site, Quicksprout created an infographic that explains how to use Tumblr for marketing, and proposes some tips and tricks on how to get the most from it.

And perhaps more important, the visual illustrates some best practices for leveraging Tumblr. Take a look at a few of them....

While Tumblr now has over 100 million blogs, it is still the most overlooked social media network for brands. Currently, only 31% of the top 100 brands have adopted a Tumblr account. Social media analytics and reporting platform Simply Measured performed a study showing just how these top brands were performing and some of the tactics employed.

Of these 31 companies tracked, 21 were active in the past 30-day period (July 5th through August 4th). This places Tumblr as the sixth most popular social network behind Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram.

Of the 21 active brands on Tumblr, 13 post 3+ times a week, 7 post daily (7+) and 6 posted more than 10 times a week.  Of the top brands active on Tumblr the average number of posts per day was 0.7 posts, with an average “note per post” of 1,462. The shelf-life on Tumblr engagement is much higher than other traditional social networks with 29% of reblogs occurring after the initial 30-day period. Even more, only 36% of reblogs happen on that same day, and posts will see 51% of total reblogs within the first week....