T is for Tumblr
Date: February 15, 2013Category: Author: Danielle Azar
I saw a post on Social Media Examiner today with a list of companies with successful Tumblr blogs. Tumblr is a social platform that I love to play with personally. I don’t have my own Tumblr blog (yet) but I follow several fashion and photography blogs that I use for inspiration when I dress or draw. The blogs that I follow are 99% visual with almost no captions or words on them at all, so I never thought about Tumblr being useful to a business, unless it’s a visually-driven one. However, after reading the Social Media Examiner article and looking through their examples, I’m inspired to think of it as a viable option for almost any business.
Granted, a lot of the businesses in the article who use Tumblr successively are fashion or photography brands like Oscar de la Renta, Modcloth, J. Crew, and several fashion magazines. Tumblr makes perfect sense for those kinds of brands. There were also some brands on there like Pew International and Rocketboom that aren’t very visual but make good use of infographics to relay their message. However, I was particularly inspired by IBM’s use of Tumblr. They have three different Tumblr blogs but I was most interested in their “Smarter Planet” blog.
As you know, IBM makes computers and computer components, which has to be one of the least visually interesting businesses in the universe. But their “Smarter Planet” blog is visual and interesting. They’ve managed to take a boring brand, and with the use of video, great content, infographics, and pictures, make themselves engaging to any reader. If a computer component manufacturer can create a great blog, then so can I.
I’m going to experiment with a Tumblr for Infinity Dental Web before I test it on our clients. This is going to be especially challenging since we are an internet marketing company without any video content, research department, or anyone who has the time to regularly produce infographics. Additionally, our staff is made up of pretty private people who are not going to be thrilled with me when I sneak up on them with my camera. It’s going to take some major creativity and cajoling on my part to create some good visual content but I have decided to make it my pet project because I believe Tumblr is going places. Once I get the hang of it, it might even be a better blog format for my clients than WordPress. I guess we’ll see.
If you have any tips or tricks on creating great Tumblr content, please let me know in the comments. I’ll need all the help I can get!
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