Each day an increasing number of people are being exposed to Tumblr through links in tweets, articles about social media, and recommendations from friends. The surprising part is how many people are becoming addicted to the free blogging service.
What is Tumblr some may ask? It’s a very simple blogging interface with no character limits. People can rate, comment on, and reblog other member’s posts. Some posts get reblogged and reblogged until the post is displayed on 100s of blogs. This type of exposure only accelerates the reblogging.
Tumblr Dash Board
Tumblr is Twitter on steroids
The simple control dashboard makes posting media, quotes, music, videos, pictures, and links a complete breeze for even the most novice users. The follow / unfollow process and associated message stream works the same as Twitter.
Users can fully customize their blogs by selecting from a large number of templates (users also can custom edit these templates; so using Google Analytics, Adsense, and other snippets of code is a snap. You can even use your own domain.
Twitter’s flash in the pan may be burning out
Twitter topped headlines all summer with the volumes of new user accounts being created. The truth is Twitter’s traffic peaked about 100 days ago and continues to look weak. Twitter has low “stickyness” for new users, below 17% ever make it past 20 tweets. Spam is becoming an increasing issue. If you don’t tweet, the service isn’t as rewarding. Many think twitter is useless if you aren’t technical enough to setup groups, use third party software, and seek out solutions to extract the useful data form within the twitterstream.
Tumblr traffic in steeping uptrend
Tumblr has been showing huge gains in traffic over recent weeks. They are attracting users from every age class (twitter has always had a problem recruiting the the 20 and under crowd) which in turn is making the site content relevant to everyone. Tumblr has massive global appeal as the numbers clearly indicate. The graphical scoreboard approach to measuring “tumbularity” is a brilliant way to keep users generating new content.
Tumblr is a toddler
Tumblr is currently flirting with the top 300 level on Alexa. In comparison with the major social networks, this rolling stone isn’t on the radar yet. Nearly half this traffic comes from within 6 states. There is still time left to stake a giant claim.
Oct 2009: Users per State
Would Tumblr be able to scale with a pyroclastic flow of massive growth? Chad King‘s research indicates their war chest contains under $5 million. The site is already sluggish during prime time hours. Uptime monitoring shows 95.83% uptime over the past 90 hours (on 15 minute checks). I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
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The blog of a nomadic internet marketer, web host owner, dating site owner and web developer.
Informative article! I agree that tumblr has a lot of potential. They have been around a while, but they didn’t take the option to sell out to the masses early on like twitter. It has stalled growth, but it also encouraged them to think each new addition carefully.
They are lacking some simple features, such as a commenting system, that would allow them to bridge the gaps in the user experience. If they can implement a few of those successfully, I think it can build some roots as a powerful web tool.
Nice article.
I use both tumblr and twitter a lot, and whilst i appreiciate what twitter does, if i had a gun to my head and was being forced to drop one of them, twitter would be on the wrong end of that decision.
I feel as though there is more a community on tumblr, couple that with the charecterless limit, and the customizable (and free) blog site, its a winner in my eyes.
Twitter does what it does well, but i think it gets held back somewhat by the media perseption of just exactly what it does. For example, none of my friends use it, why? i have no idea but i do think its got something to do with their lack of understanding. They think its simply a flashy timeline.
What are you upto? I think ‘What are you thinking’ might be a better question to ask.
The lack of commenting, or my inability to find it, also drives me nuts. The only thing I can see so far is to reblog an article and ad your comment under it. This basically requires you to blog all your comments to people, I don’t like that.
Maybe I’m just missing something here. I agree completely commenting is the biggest shortcoming.
This was really informative! Glad I read.
I find it funny though that there isn’t a tumblr option on the ‘share this’ and you also haven’t provided your blog link in your about me section (i don’t know, maybe you wanted to keep that private).
I had twitter for a few months, but it just got boring REALLY quick. being limited to the amount of characters used is frustrating at times. Tumblr is just a more fun community.
I think twitter’s June/July users went up because of all the celebrity deaths.
Anyways, again, informative article! :)
I have a tumblr account, but haven’t really fully delved into it yet. With only so much time in each day to designate to my blog, I usually focus on Twitter and Facebook promotion. Sounds like I might need to switch things up a bit!
Adam one thing Tumblr has that helps ppl with little time is a very simple queue and scheduling process. There are also plugins that allow you to just drag things from your browser into your blog.
You could enter a quote, an image url, a video url on youtube, and just a status about your week, all in under 10 minutes, put them in your queue, then set it to post a new article every 24 hours.
It’s easy to move things around to determine the order they will be posted in.
You can also auto integrate feeds from your personal blog into tumblr to promote your other articles!
Good luck!