Wait, you ask: What's Tumblr, and why do I need to figure it into my social media strategy? Tumblr is a social blogging platform that, like Pinterest, is very image-centric. (Indeed, Tumblr last week teamed with The Guardian to blog the first presidential debate using "live GIFs.")
"Tumblr strives to capture that niche between Twitter and Pinterest/Instagram, where most users are interested in image-driven posts with a bit more commentary," Jake Wengroff, founder of social business consultancy JXB1, told The BrainYard.
According to the April 2012 AdAge Insights Trend Report, the site had almost 50 million Tumblr blogs and 20 billion posts as of March. Tumblr's demographics skew young (almost 50% of users are between the ages of 18 and 34) and female (54% of users). Sixty percent of users have an average household income of less than $50,000, while 25% earn between $50,000 and $100,000. Forty-three percent have a college degree.
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So, the time and attention your organization pays to Tumblr--or whether it pays any at all--will depend a lot on your own customer demographics and business goals. But if there is a match and your organization does decide to spread its social media resources to include Tumblr, it will now be a lot easier to see what kind of return you are getting on that investment.
One of the big complaints, from a business point of view, about Tumblr has been its lack of analytics. That changed last week, when Tumblr announced that it was set to provide an analytics dashboard via a partnership with Union Metrics, a third-party analytics provider.
According to UnionMetrics, the service will provide marketers with information about:
-- Post and note volume, to show overall engagement levels and trends over time.
-- Top contributors and curators, to help identify key influencers.
-- Analysis of posts and tags, to surface most popular posts.
-- Post engagement details, including the full reblog tree and interactions over time.
As social media platforms proliferate, and as the business of doing business on social media and networks grows more complex, it might be easy to just stick with (relative) old stalwarts like Facebook and Twitter. But as (relative) upstarts like Pinterest and now Tumblr show traction and the ability to provide business tools, it will be important for organizations to weigh new opportunities or risk being left behind.
Is your company making use of Tumblr? Please let us know in the comments section below.
Follow Deb Donston-Miller on Twitter at @debdonston.
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