Marketers who are trying to keep up with the fast-paced world of social media may want to try engaging consumers through another emerging platform – tumblr. Although the site doesn’t currently offer paid ad options, some say this growing blog community is particularly well-suited to establishing a business as a thought leader and to getting users involved in co-creating a brand.
Tumblr is a social blog site that gives users room to share information that matters to them, and it lets businesses cultivate brand loyalty by rewarding followers who contribute to the quality of the content they provide on their blogs. Users can choose from hundreds of themes that capture the spirit of their businesses, and tumblr makes it easy to aggregate content that a blog’s followers may be interested in reading.
The site’s founder, David Karp, told the New York Times that tumblr lets marketers create a business’ identity and brand personality in a way that is not possible on Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, a tumblr blog does not simply include user-generated posts – it requires a level of community interaction that will help brands engage consumers on the site.
The number of users on the site is increasing every day. The Times reports tumblr, which was founded three years ago, currently boasts 6.6 million bloggers. Recently, major funders have invested in the potential of the site to gain more users by awarding tumblr $5 million to put toward development, and tumblr currently garners around 1.5 billion page views per month.
Marketers who move fast may benefit from early adoption of tumblr by becoming other users’ most trusted sources of information. But whether businesses create blogs for the site or not, brands should try to establish themselves as thought leaders on other platforms where they can easily engage consumers.
Harris Interactive reports that 75 percent of Americans are more trusting of companies that use microblogging sites, and that trust may turn into brand advocacy as well as convert followers into customers.
