Photo By: The Nothing Corporation
AdAge® recently published an article about the social media/blogging platform Tumblr. Tumblr is essentially photo blogging, so I view it as more blog than social media. What the AdAge® article makes note of is that Tumblr has been especially well-suited for the fashion and media industries. The AdAge® article mostly focuses on the fact that the way Tumblr presents content is especially well-suited for the fashion and media industries. But, just as important, is the fact that we are talking about industries as a whole having a presence on the Tumblr platform.
If, say, only one or two brands in these industries were using Tumblr, it might not be as important for other brands in the industry to use Tumblr as well. This is because the audiences for this industry might not default to using Tumblr when they want to find industry content. Yes, it’s possible that they could get to Tumblr through search engines, but they would be starting with search engines and not Tumblr. With the fashion and media industries having saturated Tumblr with content, the audience for these industries are bypassing search engines altogether and living within Tumblr for their fashion and media branded content.
Until the Audience Warrants It, Steer Clear of Borrowed Online Real Estate
There are a number of other industries out there, where the way content is presented on Tumblr makes sense for them, but maybe Tumblr itself does not. I have clients who have audiences such as architects and designers. If ever there was an audience who needed visual content as much as articles, it’s architects and designers. But until a platform like Tumblr is saturated enough by the respective industry and until a brand has enough image content to warrant having a presence on Tumblr, it may be more important to take cues from how Tumblr presents content, but actually host content on the company’s website blog.
Where Tumblr is more like social media than blog is in the fact that it is borrowed real estate. Brands have embraced platforms like Facebook and Twitter because the pros of the number of people that are on them outweigh the cons of the fact that brands don’t control Facebook or Twitter entirely and are at the mercy of changes by Facebook or Twitter.
For similar reasons, until Tumblr can offer your industry the number of people (audience) that makes it worth it to have your content on borrowed online real estate, you may want to just have your blog do its best Tumblr impersonation. That way, you’re still in control of the online real estate that it sits on. Because, who knows? Tumblr could one day make a platform decision that throttles your content’s impact on SEO. Or by putting your content on Tumblr, you could be handing over rights to your content, of which you might not be aware.
