With millions of highly engaged users all over the world, Tumblr has become one of the biggest names in social media today. Tumblr is basically simplest way of blogging. To start your blog-blogging at Tumble you just need to enter your Name, Email and suggested link of your blog page. As it so simple, do you think Tumblr can grow your business? That’s all, your blog is ready to publish your thought and share it with world. It’s not at all surprising, then, that many businesses have decided that it would be a good platform for augmenting some of their social media strategies. After all, what company wouldn’t be excited at the prospect of tapping into an incredibly active and ever-growing audience? As far as blogging options go, this is the most promising in terms of attracting a potential market.
Of course, things are a little more complicated than that. Much like other social channels, you need to be absolutely sure that it’s the right avenue to take for your marketing endeavors. Apart from using it correctly, you need to know whether or not it can, as a platform, REALLY help you promote your company to the right people. Integrating your business with social media such as using twitter hash tags, using Facebook as a business tool are great ways to build social audience. So should you or should you NOT take up Tumblr? Here are a few things to consider.
Who, exactly, is your target market?
This is the number one question you should be asking yourself before you join this particular bandwagon. While sites like Facebook and Twitter
cover a fairly large demographic – they have users that range from the very young to the very old, for example – Tumblr is predominantly populated by people who are in their teens and twenties. This is not to say that you won’t be able to find older users in this site; it’s just that the most active users tend to be young. Of course, this means that you’d be better off with another social channel if your product or service is more geared towards older people. If you’d like to target a young and hip crowd, then Tumblr can be your best friend.
What’s your preferred communication style?
Do you like being clever with words (so you can persuade people rationally) or are you more of an audio-visual type of communicator (so you can have some “wow factor”)? If you’re more inclined to promote your products and services with text heavy posts, then you need to reconsider your options because the most popular Tumblr posts are mostly image-based or video-based. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that most Tumblr users belong to a younger generation, who tend to appreciate multimedia more than any other demographic on the Internet.
In other words, you need to strike Tumblr off your list of online marketing options if you’re more inclined to create clever and engaging articles than interesting images or videos.
How much control do you want to have over it?
If you want to have full control of your Tumblr account and use it as your main business blog, you’ll probably have a big problem. Among other things, it’s still a little unstable as far as social platforms go – which means the site goes down more easily than others and it doesn’t function 100% for days after it’s gone back online. It also doesn’t allow for comments (only private messaging, re-blogging, and the like), nor does have a built-in tool to let you monitor site metrics. In other words, Tumblr really is ideal for casual promotions and not heavy-duty marketing.
It’s not that you can’t have a Tumblr account for business. It’s just that it can’t be your main marketing channel on the Internet. At the end of the day, it might work better as an augmentation for your promotional efforts rather than the main thrust.
Are you using any other social media platform that Tumbler, Facebook, Google plus or Twitter? Please let us know.
