Tumblr is set to become the microblogging tool of 2010 with its massive growth, yet still many people don’t fully understand what Tumblr does, or how it works. If you’ve ever tried to start a blog, but found yourself struggling to find the time, Tumblr is something you’re definitely going to want to take a look at.
What is tumblr?
Put simply, Tumblr is a service that does exactly what WordPress does for blogging, but for microblogging. To fully understand what Tumblr does, you first need to understand what these so-called microblogs actually are.
A microblog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumbleblogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. – Wikipedia
What does this mean? Well basically, Tumblr fills the gap between Twitter, where people tweet resources, images, and thoughts, and traditional blogging platforms, where each post is a proper article. Instead, Tumblr works with seven types of post; text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video, and it handles them all very well.
Where does it fit?
- Think of your blog as 3-5 paragraphs
- Tumblr as one paragraph
- Twitter as one sentence.
How I see using the different platforms to communicate is simple when I have a thought that fits into one sentence I will use Twitter, one paragraph I will use Tumblr, when I need more words, my blog.
I am just now breaking into Tumblr. What I see myself doing is producing a full piece of content on my blog, distilling it down to a summary paragraph on Tumblr and then promoting the key thought (the headline of the original post) on Twitter.
I look at my blog as my information hub. I want all other touch points (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc) to promote people to get the Full Story here on my blog.
Why is Tumblr becoming increasingly popular?
According to Tumblr statistic’s, in the last six months, Tumblr has grown from around 300M monthly page views, to over 1 Billion in February 2010; a massive growth for any product, and it speaks for itself really. A product doesn’t grow at such a rapid rate, if people aren’t enjoying using it.
More Tumblr Stats:
- 500 Terabytes served in the last 30 days
- 82 servers
- 2,000,000 posts per day
- 15,000 new users every day
- 18 new posts every second
Easy to update
The biggest reason behind Tumblr’s growing support, is it’s vast number of social features, and it’s ease of use. For a start, Tumblr make it extremely offer for you to post to your blog, even if you can’t access your homepage yourself. Here are some of the clever ways Tumblr makes it possible for you to update your microblog:
- Text your blog updates from any mobile phone
- Email your updates via one of the most sophisticated email publishing platform available.
- A Bookmarklet allows you to post anything and everything you come across while browsing the web.
- Post via AIM by messaging TumblrBot.
- Phone your TumblrBlog, and leave voice posts.
- Automatically post from any other site or profile.
- Use the official Tumblr iPhone app to easily update your blog.
- Third Party App’s expand your options even further.
Social Network Integration
Definitely high up on the list of reasons for Tumblr’s acceptance has been its solid two-way integration with other social media, and networking services. Part of its automatic posting from other sites come from major names such as Digg, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, but it doesn’t stop there. As well as having the ability to automatically pull in your content live from these sites, you can also send information back. Facebook is a prime example with its ability to show your activity on Tumblr on your Facebook wall, keeping all your friends up to date with what your blogging and activity.
Other notable features
Other than those already mentioned, Tumblr also focus’ on those important, but small things that you need.
- Easily add any analytics tracking code you want to your tumbleblog
- Tubmlr is optimised for Google in everything from the site slugs, to the sitemap
- Built in privacy allows you to restrict specific posts, or your whole blog to certain people
- The ability to use your own custom domains on your tumbleblog
- FeedBurner support allows you to see important RSS feed stats
- It’s free, and you don’t need to pay for hosting, or storage!
- You have the ability to create your own custom theme.
Conclusion
Tumblr is a fantastic piece of self promotion kit, filling in that gap in the market between full blogs, social networking such as facebook, and status updating from Twitter, and it does it extremely well. It makes blogging and sharing things you find on the internet a breeze, and most importantly, unlike Twitter, it does so visually. If you find yourself failing to keep a full blog up-to-date, and enjoy sharing the things you find, the there’s no easier way to do so than Tumblr, so give it a go.
Keep an eye on my on Tumblr
photo credit: davidville
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