#INFOGRAPHIC: What Your Favorite Social Network Says About You

It’s no wonder everyone is on one or more of social networking sites. What you chose as your favorite SNS says a lot about your own preferences and needs, and even reveals your personality. It says who we are in ways we wouldn’t have thought of. Check out What Your Favorite Social Network Says About You.

Published by irfanahmad1989

Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

#INFOGRAPHIC: #Tumblr By The Numbers

In light of Tumblr’s recent acquisition, I thought it would be interesting to see what Yahoo! was paying $1.1 Billion for. In short, it’s a ton of traffic. I’m excited to see what kinds of advertising products and targeted tools it releases as it moves to monetize the site. Since its inception in 2007, Tumblr has grown to boast over 185 million monthly visitors. This makes it the 31st most popular website in the world. And it’s more than just teenagers posting cat GIFs. Many brands, especially in the fashion industry, have adopted Tumblr as its blogging platform of choice. It’s built-in “Follow” and sharing mechanisms make it easy for content to spread. And its Explore page makes trending content easy to be found. The following infographic shows who is on Tumblr and how they’re using the site.

Tumblr by the Numbers infographic

#Stilly Hopes to Be #Vine for #Tumblr

By Cameron Scott at Social Times: 

Versagram released its second app, Stilly, which lets users record animated GIF and post it to Tumblr or send it by SMS or iMessage.

To create the animated GIF, users simply record it on the phone. After recording, the app prompts the user to share the GIF via Tumblr or text message.

“This is addictive,” wrote Tumblr CEO David Karp on the company’s blog.

Versagram’s free moniker app allows users to create photographic messages that they can share through Instagram or iMessage, but not SMS message.

Both apps are for iOS only.

#INFOGRAPHIC: The $5,000,000 Social Commerce Breakdown

Addshoppers.com has put together an analysis of which social network provides the most value to an ecommerce store. The infographic also shows who an average sharer is, what they're most likely to share and what they share to each social media site.


Published by AddShoppers.com

Social Sharing Drives Sales infographic

Was Yahoo's Tumblr Buy a Smart Investment?

By David Taintor at AdWeek: 

Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr has dominated the tech headlines this week, so it should come as no surprise that a panel of Web publishing luminaries discussing the future of media on Thursday weighed in on the portal's recent mega purchase.

Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget called the deal "a very smart thing for Yahoo to do," adding that it's an "aggressive move" that could work out for the company. Whether the $1.1 billion price tag is worth it depends on what Yahoo does with the company, he said.

For his part, BuzzFeed CEO and co-founder Jonah Peretti believes the Tumblr deal represents a shift in media: social is no longer a niche method of consuming content, its now the dominant way people discover information.

"You'd rather get something from your friend sharing it than you would get it from a headline or have it pushed to you through the industrial media apparatus of broadcast pipes and printing presses. You'd rather have something come to you through sharing. and Marissa (Mayer, Yahoo's CEO) understood that and that's part of why she spent so much on Tumblr.

And Mark Thompson, the CEO of The New York Times Company, argued the Yahoo-Tumblr deal is also a good thing for New York City—where Tumblr is based—and the potential for tech and content to come together in the city.

But it wasn't all a Tumblr lovefest. Eventually the panel—hosted by I Want Media and titled "Future of Media: 2013—turned to Web video, a burgeoning space in online media. 'Going forward, how important is online video?' moderator Patrick Phillips asked, turning to HuffPost Live president Roy Sekoff.

"How important is LeBron James to the Heat, that would be my position on it," Sekoff said. I think it's incredibly important. It's not the only thing, but it's something that people are very interested in."

Blodget praised HuffPost's innovation in video, but predicted the site's 12-hour broadcast model won't work. "I don't think that the world wants another cable channel," he said. What is working for HuffPost, he added, is the trove of clips that come out of that half-day broadcast. Sekoff countered that the clips are actually part of HuffPost's business model.

Read the full story >>

How Will Yahoo's Purchase of Tumblr Affect Advertisers?

By Mary Lisbeth D'Amico at ClickZ:

Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, announced today, will bring together Yahoo's financial resources and backend technology with the reach of one of the Web's fastest growing and hippest blogging platforms.

But with a concrete monetization strategy for Tumblr still in the works—and a need to not alienate Tumblr' youthful, ad-adverse audience—digital marketers will likely have a wait ahead of them before they see more advertising opportunities on the platform.

"As with any platform so loved by its user base, Yahoo and Tumblr must tread cautiously," says Ming Linsley, senior director, social media at media agency MEC.

But she also sees many benefits in the tie-up. Yahoo's backend infrastructure will enhance Tumblr's ability to help advertisers measure the impact of their ad campaigns on the platform, she said, while gaining access to Tumblr's 18-34 year old audience as well a successful mobile app. "There are so many visual opportunities with Tumblr," she says. Tumblr has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and more than half of them use the mobile app for an average of seven sessions per day.

But Roj Niyogi, co-founder and CEO at Perk, a loyalty web browser company, believes that if Yahoo pushes too hard to sell ads on the platform, users could flee to new competitors such as Svbtle and Medium.

"Yahoo acquiring Tumblr only provides Yahoo the fuel and potential to thrive, but nothing more," he said. "The question is whether or not users will abandon the Tumblr ship because alternatives exist or see true value in Tumblr despite the impending monetization strategy Yahoo/Tumblr has for it."

In a conference call today, Yahoo executives roughly detailed their plans for beefing up the advertising on the site by 2014, which reportedly only saw about $13 million in revenue last year. CEO Marissa Mayer said the company will explore unusual formats, including running ads with the explicit permission of selected bloggers.

Tumblr first introduced native ads in April 2012 and, more recently, introduced sponsored posts into its mobile app.

In a statement announcing the deal, Meyer also said that Tumblr users will be able to use Yahoo's personalization technology and search infrastructure to help discover content, while Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts to Yahoo's network and search.

Mayer also stressed that Tumblr will remain independent, with David Karp remaining as CEO and that the "product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators."

Perk's Roj says he sees potential if the companies develop in-stream advertising similar to that recently introduced by Yahoo on its homepage, which are embedded into their Twitteresque newsfeed. "Similar strategies implemented on Tumblr could help strike the right balance and not have Tumblr users running to competing services," Roj said.

Greg Kahn, chief business development officer at, MXM, a customer engagement agency, is optimistic that well-crafted native ads on Tumblr will not scare a significant portion of its user base.

"Facebook and Twitter may have had some people drop off the platform since the introduction of native ads, but I think both are still incredibly relevant. Consumers are starting to understand that they need to pay for content in one form or the other, either through advertisements or premium subscriptions," he said.

Yahoo Buying Tumblr for $1.1 Billion, Vows Not to Screw it up

(Reuters) - Yahoo Inc will buy blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, giving the Internet pioneer a much-needed social media platform to reach a younger generation of users and breathe new life into its ailing brand

The deal, announced on Monday, is a bold bet by Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revitalize the company by co-opting a Web property with strong visitor traffic but little revenue.

The combination of Yahoo and Tumblr creates an online powerhouse with roughly one billion users, which will draw in more advertisers and help Yahoo keep visitors on its properties for longer periods of time, Mayer told Reuters in an interview.

"Tumblr in terms of users and traffic is an immediate growth story for us," she said.

Analysts say Yahoo appeared to be overpaying for a business that has never posted a profit, makes a fraction of Yahoo's sales, and may not contribute significantly to revenue for years. But the company, rebuffed by the French government when it tried to pay $1 billion for video site Dailymotion earlier this year, had to do something to plug a hole in its social media efforts.

Yahoo made clear it was sensitive to concerns that it might damage Tumblr by making it less irreverent or more corporate.

"Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business," Yahoo said in a statement.

The deal will make Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, 26, a multimillionaire.

Tumblr is one of the Web's most popular hubs of so-called user-generated content, drawing young people who use the platform to post pictures and text. It has more than 100 million blogs in its network, ranging from "White Men Wearing Google Glass" - a collection of photos poking fun at the early adopters of the wearable computing devices - to housing-focused "The Worst Room."

Though Yahoo remains one of the Web's most popular destinations, it has seen its revenue shrink in recent years as consumers and advertisers favor rivals such as Google Inc and Facebook Inc. The deal is expected to increase Yahoo's audience by 50 percent.

The acquisition, which will use up about a fifth of Yahoo's $5.4 billion in cash and marketable securities, is the largest by far since Mayer took the reins in July with the goal of reversing a long decline in Yahoo's business and Web traffic.

7 Things Marketers Should Know About Tumblr

By Jeff Haden at Inc.com:

With 105 million blogs and 49 billion posts, Tumblr, the free blog hosting and social networking site, is the 32^nd most popular site in the world.

So if you're not using Tumblr as part of your marketing efforts, you're missing a very large boat.

"Tumblr isn't a blog platform like WordPress; it's a social network that has a blogging platform." says Neil Patel, co-founder of the Web analytics firm KISSmetrics. "The beautiful thing about Tumblr is that it makes it really easy to share your content with millions of Tumblr users... so you can get a big audience without spending a ton of money on marketing."

Here are Neil's tips for marketing your business on Tumblr:

At first, forget marketing.

Your standard marketing spiel does not apply.  Definitely decide your goal or goals for your Tumblr blog such as building brand awareness, educating customers, improving customer service, or whatever your goal may be--and then immediately shift the focus from your company to your audience.

How?

Provide great content.

As Neil says, "give stuff away for free." Not products or services, but information. Or entertainment. Or advice. Or all of the above.

"When you give valuable stuff away for free," Neil says, "your audience starts to think, 'Wow, they're really smart. What do they do?' Then they'll check you out. That's how you convert: providing value by educating, entertaining, etc.--what I call building up karma points."

Provide evergreen content.

News doesn't do particularly well on Tumblr. (Besides, why create content with a naturally short shelf life?)

While you can certainly mix up your content, make sure to create some number of guides, how-to posts, and lists. Not only do you create content with legs, you also give search engines significant food for indexing thought.

Create content people will share.

Like other social networks, Tumblr makes it really easy for users to share content with others.

As long as your content is worth sharing, of course.

Photos--good photos--do well. Funny posts, informational posts, combining a fact with an image to create what Neil calls a "factograph"--they can all do well. Don't think about what you want to share but what your audience will want to share.

Occasionally create long posts.

Tumblr is perfect for sharing shorts bursts of content like photos, charts, quotes, and videos.

Yet according to Neil a great way to increase the chances of your content going viral is to publish a long post. "The impact of something long coming across your visitors' screens can be quite startling... getting them to pause and take notice," Neil says.

Quality longer posts can create a spike of traffic, are more likely to show up in Tumblr searches and Google searches, and create a spike in comments--all of which leads to a bigger audience and more followers.

Tag wisely.

Unlike search engines, Tumblr search relies on tags, not keywords. These tags, which you choose, explain and categorize the content you create.

"Between seven and 12 tags is the optimum number that will not look like spam but will also draw a net wide enough to catch a lot of searches... and that's the key," Neil says, "since you want to end up in as many searches as possible."

Choose relevant tags, and if you create niche content use niche tags to categorize that content.

Network with other Tumblr users.

While a blogging platform, Tumblr is inherently social. That means you need to network. Draw in friends and colleagues. Share with your vendors and partners. Draw in connections and followers from other platforms.

The more you share and the more others share, the bigger your audience and followers and the greater your influence--and the better your Tumblr marketing.

(For more information, including tips on how to optimize your Tumblr blog, check out Neil's The Marketer's Guide to Tumblr.)

10 Top Social Media Monitoring & Analytics Tools

By Melissa O'Connor at Tweek Your Biz:

Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for businesses. Social media can be an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. It’s clear that social media is valuable, but measuring  ROI proves to be a challenge.

And, with all of the statistics available, it can be difficult to distill what is most important and useful. It can also be out of budget for many businesses to employ an expert or any of the robust reporting tools that are available.

There are some simple ways for monitoring activity on social media platforms. Some obvious ways are internal methods such as monitoring Facebook likes, retweets on Twitter, basically tracking what your customers are interested in and changing what isn’t working. I would suggest making a weekly or a monthly plan outlining status updates and competitions etc. There are also external sites which are ideal for monitoring and analytics.

Useful external sites for social media monitoring and analytics:-

# 1. Social Mention

Social Mention will allow you to track and measure who is talking about you, your company, your product, or any topic related to your industry. Social Mention pulls data from hundred + social media platforms to give you the most accurate, real-time information landscape in real-time.

# 2. Tweet Deck

TweetDeck is an effective and useful tool that allows you to arrange feeds from all of your social networks in one place using the TweetDeck dashboard. You can also schedule tweets and set-up customizable feeds for your social search needs. Lists can also be created of the people you follow. These lists can allow you to manage different target groups you want to interact with and keep an eye on what’s being tweeted about.

# 3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my personal favourite. It’s easy to use and allows you to organize and execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. Hootsuite enables organizations launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences.

Key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and  Google+ Pages, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more.

Hootsuite’s geo-location and geo- targeting can help get your business more seen on social media platforms. HootSuite also offers tools to help multiple collaborators be assigned to manage your social media accounts more securely. Analytics tools are also available on Hootsuite to get more of an insight into your businesses participation on social media platforms.

# 4. Twilert

Twilert is a Twitter monitoring application that monitors all mentions of your chosen keywords across the Twitter-sphere. What’s best about Twilert is that it doesn’t simply monitor @mentions or hashtags, but monitors all words within a tweet. So you will never miss out on anything you are searching for. It’s an easy platform to use for social analytics. You can sign in to Twilert with your Google or Twitter account. The keywords you search can be sent directly to your email address.

What’s great about Twilert as well is that you can do an advanced search for any topic. You can choose a particular geographical area. Maybe a certain target audience you haven’t quite targeted yet that you want to do some market research on, to see if your product or service meets their needs.  You can search by peoples attitude either positive, negative or asking a question.  This could be quite useful. See picture below to get a better understanding of the advanced search tool for Twilert.

# 5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social lets you monitor your business & manage conversations with one simple marketing analytics tool. Publish & schedule updates across social channels with a single click. Manage teams, large social channels, tasks and assignments to make life a bit easier.

Sprout Social allows you to monitor your business efficiently and effectively and help manage&grow your social presence across different platforms. Sprout Social integrates with Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, FourSquare and other networks where your target market could be engaging with businesses similar to yours. Other useful tools on Sprout Social are contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, analytics.

Sprout Social offers a thirty day free trial. So give it a try if you think it would be a useful analytics tool for your business.

# 6. Social Oomph

Social Oomph is a useful marketing tool especially for Twitter. Twitter is an excellent way for a business to build relationships with customers and assist in retaining them as well.

There are different tools that will let you manage multiple Twitter profiles and you can configure lots of features such as Auto Direct Message, Auto Follow and Auto unfollow.

If it’s suitable for your business then I would suggest sending an auto direct message to all your new followers. You have more than likely been sent one by someone you have followed. Here an example: Thanks for connecting here on Twitter, will love to see you on Facebook [Link]

Twitter users will usually follow you because you follow them back and later on if they unfollow you. Social Oomph’s Twitter auto unfollow tool will come in handy to help clean up your newsfeed.

# 7. Sysomos

Sysomos another great social media analytics tool for businesses. Sysomos is the greek word for “everything together “. You will be provided with intelligence and insights needed to measure results and ultimately make decisions on what’s working and what’s not working.

Sysomos collects data from blogs, Twitter, social networks, messages, boards, wikis and major news sources. Sysomos give you the ability to notice the tone of conversations and identify opinions by gender, age and location.

Some of Sysomos’ products include: Heartbeat, a social media monitoring and measurement tool. Heartbeat provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly and intuitive graphics. Sysomos MAP, and Traffic Analytics. You can request a demo here.

# 8. Brand Monitor

Brand Monitor is an easy-to-use social media monitoring and engagement platform. Brand Monitor provides a powerful blend of consumer brand choice, multi-dimensional insights and relative acumen. A dashboard is available for you to view weekly trends, reaction meter, posts volume, reaction graph and top referrals. A graph with positive and negative response trends for the past month can also be viewed.

Sentiments can be manually updated and Brand Monitor is capable of learning this and using this information to assign sentiment for future posts. An email can be sent to you daily, weekly and monthly that will keep you updated. Dashboard Charts and other data can be easily exported into an editable Excel sheet or CSV file.

# 9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and easy to use analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and analytical marketing purposes. There is an endless amount of data available to analyse on Google Analytics. I will recommend some resources that will be beneficial for your business.

• Monitoring traffic sources: Tracking which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website is essential. Using these keywords then throughout your website will help you rank higher in SEO
• Monitoring referring sites: Understanding which websites are sending the most quality traffic to your website will allow you to focus more effort and time on those sites, and less of your time on under performing websites.
• Monitoring the types of visitors: Analysing how much of your website traffic is new visitors against returning visitors? This information will help you run certain marketing activities aimed at new visitors or returning visitors. A dedicated part of your website could be created to inform returning visitors of new products or services available by your business
• Monitoring popular pages. Analysing what pages are performing best on your website will give you an idea to what your visitors are most interested in and what needs work on your website
• Monitoring visits. Analysing what days visitors are coming to visit your website will allow you to publish new content or launch a new marketing activity on those days in order to attract the most attention
• Monitoring geographical location. Google Analytics presents data that will let you analyse the top ten countries that visit your page. This could be useful data for your business that may help you decide on entering into a new market or increase your product or service offering in a new market.

# 10. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another effective monitoring system to analyse social media. You can track anything you want. It can be a useful way for finding out what’s being said about you or your company. You can keep track of articles you write under your name; monitoring the competition or simply to keep up to date on any given topic.

You can set up Google Alerts to monitor certain keywords, such as your blog name, your business name and your personal name, and you will receive an e-mail any time they find those keywords in their search. With Google Alerts, you can be instantly notified when and where any bad content was placed on any social media platform and be able to respond accordingly.

It is essential for every organization to monitor and track what is being said about them. It is especially important to interact with customers through social media platforms and analyse any areas of their social media platforms that need to be improved and essentially keep up to this on this very fast paced environment.

Obviously there are lots more Social Media monitoring and analytics tools. I’d love to hear any recommendations you have below.

Pinfluencer Is Now Piqora As It Preps To Add Tumblr, Twitter Into Its Social Marketing Net

By Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch:
Pinfluencer, one of the many sites that have sprouted up to help companies track Pinterest usage, is today announcing a rebranding to Piqora, a move that the company says fits with its wider strategy to mine information not just from Pinterest and Facebook, but other image-based social networks like Tumblr, Polyvore and Twitter. To go along with its longer term social marketing ambitions, it is also spreading its product wings with the launch of Gallery, which lets brands, retailers and other businesses take products that get pinned elsewhere and aggregate and show them on their own sites.

The two moves come as Pinterest slowly gears up to take more commercial control of its massive data stream of consumers pinning branded content, and brands and other businesses trying to use the wildly popular social network to push their products.

The change to Piqora, says CEO Sharad Verma, was for a couple of reasons. First, lots of wordplay, eg, it brings to mind “pics”, short for pictures, as well as “pick”, reminiscent of the curating role that many play on sites like Pinterest, and IQ for analytics.

Secondly, he says it was also made to set itself apart from the number of other pun-tastic, Pinterest-referencing branded companies in the bunfight for offering analytics, marketing services, influence/sentiment analysis and more, and to also get the company itself away from being too tied to Pinterest by association. “There are a lot of companies in that bucket whose names start with ‘pin,’ and we don’t want to be confused with being a ‘Klout for Pinterest,’” he told TechCrunch. They may have also had a quiet nudge from Pinterest itself there, too, since the company these days discourages businesses from using “Pin” in their names. “But also, eventually we are going to be a multi-platform company.”

#INFOGRAPHIC: Who's Sharing What - The State of Social Sharing in 2013

We're discussing the latest trends in social sharing: the ecosystem gets busier and busier, and now everybody seems to share (and overshare) stuff all day within their social graph. We tried to zoom out as much as possible for you to be able to see the whole picture: the state of social sharing in the beginning of 2013 and everything you need to know about its eight major players


This Infographic is Published by WebHostingBuzz and Designed by Mostash

Who's Sharing What - The State of Social Sharing in 2013 infographic by mostash.

#INFOGRAPHIC: Blogging for Business, Blogging for Profit

The infographic project was created to help the average business owner, or aspiring blogger, understand the ins and outs of blogging. Easy to understand and full of amazing content, this infographic answers critical questions like: How often do most businesses blog? Are consumer buying decisions influenced by blogs? What are the Top Earning Blogs and how do they create revenue? It also breaks down the Top 7 Blogging Platforms and their features, who’s blogging and how blogging can help your business.

Blogging for Business, Blogging for Profit infographic by skyboxcreative.

Tumblr Has an Official Analytics Tool

By Devon Glenn at Social Times:
Tumblr is one step closer to building an advertising business within the cozy blogging community known for single-subject blogs and animated pictures.

The Next Web reports that Union Metrics, the social analytics company behind TweetReach, has secured access to Tumblr’s firehose to create the social network’s first official analytics platform. Tumblr marketing and revenue consultant Rick Webb announced the news at today’s Advertising Week keynote in New York City while onstage with Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis.

Union Metrics will pull information from Tumblr through social data company Gnip. With 75 million blogs, 32 billion posts, and more than 70 million new posts on the blogging site per day, someone has to make sense of all that data.

Available by invite only, Union Metrics for Tumblr can help bloggers determine what kind of content resonates with their readers; marketers can use it to learn what people in their target demographic like to read. Here are some of the things that the tool will be able to measure:

• Top Posts
• Top Tags
• Popular Contributors
• Top Curators (People Who Reblog Content)
• Top Amplifiers (People Who Reblog the Rebloggers)
• A Reblog Tree to Visualize How Content Spreads

Tumblr has been selling ads since May 2012. Said Tumblr VP of product Derek Gottfrid at the Social Curation Summit in July, “We put brands on an equal footing with users. The challenge is how to capture user value.”




Read the full story here

INFOGRAPHIC: Are You Revealing Too Much On Social Networks?

 Are you revealing to much on Social networks?
Social-networking sites are a hacker’s dream: a sometimes poublic online community where unsuspecting people post personal information. But what information can and should be posted on social networks?


This Infographic is Designed and Published by Trendlabs via PCmag.com

INFOGRAPHIC: The Current State Of Social Networks 2012

By Shea Bennett  at Media Bistro:
Did you know that Twitter is the social network with the strongest growth rate in 2012, ahead of LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit?

Facebook? That didn’t even make the cut. Still, when you’re closing in fast on one billion users, your annual growth rate does tend to slow down a smidgen. Still, don’t shed a tear for Mark Zuckerberg – save those for the owners of Digg, Bebo, Friendster and, of course, MySpace, who are the four social networks most in decline, reminding us that success in this space can be both dramatic and fleeting.

This data comes courtesy of Ignite Social Media, who have compiled the infographic of infographics about the state of social media, worldwide, in 2012. Ignite’s research revealed that while social media as a whole continues to plateau – we haven’t seen any real growth, planet-wide, since 2009 – there are many success stories to be found. Pinterest has quickly established itself as the de facto social network for women, and Plaxo (who knew that was still going?) is incredibly popular with senior citizens.

Check out all this, and more, in the visualization below.

Find Your Facebook and Twitter Friends on Tumblr with The New [LOOKUP] Page

By Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:
Popular blogging platform Tumblr has quietly introduced a minor, but notable new feature: a better way to find contacts through your other social networking services or Gmail. On the page available at Tumblr.com/lookup you can now connect your Gmail, Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to find all your friends’ Tumblr blogs.

Handy. Well, handy if you’re the one doing the looking, I suppose. As Buzzfeed’s community moderator Ryan Broderick hilariously tweeted, “Great, thanks to the new http://www.tumblr.com/lookup/ page all my friends will find my One Direction fanblog I moderate!”

Oh and yes they will, too. Because it appears that the option to remove yourself from social discovery is opt-out. While Tumblr doesn’t appear to have made an official announcement on this new feature yet (at least via the official Tumblr blog, that is), the company did tweet, err…re-tweet, about the addition yesterday. And today, responding to an outraged user via Twitter, the Tumblr account tweeted back “if you don’t want your Facebook or twitter linked, just uncheck the box in your settings.”

Read the full article here

The Marketer’s Guide to Tumblr

By Neil Patel at KISSmetrics: 

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last year, you more than likely have heard about the micro-blogging platform called Tumblr.
The reason you’ve heard of it is simply because of its staggering rise to stardom. By November 2011, Tumblr had grown by 900% in less than a year…passing up its competitor WordPress.
If you haven’t by now, you need to be looking at how to effectively add Tumblr to your marketing efforts. This guide will show you where to start, how to grow your efforts and even how to monetize your Tumblr.
Let’s get started.
Pssst … scroll to the bottom to download the Advanced Marketer’s Guide To Tumblr.

Creating A Strategic Plan For Tumblr

If you are a marketer, then it’s probably second nature for you to sit down with your team to create a marketing plan for any new venture like Tumblr.
If not, then here are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

• Why do you want to create a Tumblr blog? Just because everyone else is isn’t a good answer. Do you want to build awareness to your brand? Another blog? Do you want to create revenue? Do you want to educate customers? Or improve customer service relations? Your answers will help you create a sustainably successful Tumblr blog.
• Who will run the Tumblr blog? Just like running a blog for a small business, you can get a several people throughout your company to use it. But it’s very important that you assign someone to be responsible for it. And if you hire outside help, make sure you establish understood expectations…like who posts, responds to comments, builds a following, engages the Tumblr blogosphere and shares on social media.
• Who is your audience? Are you trying to reach a different segment of the market with your Tumblr? It will totally pay off if you take the time to figure out who your audience is and what makes them tick. You can use these marketing research tricks to help you.
• What will be the focus behind your Tumblr blog? I’ll go into greater detail below to help you determine your focus.
• What are your weaknesses and strengths? Have you been able to adopt other social media strategies successfully…or have they all been a flop? Where your past efforts have failed, you may want to consider hiring someone who is strong in your weaknesses.
• Are you truly committed to this effort?  Probably one of the most important questions you have to ask yourself when it comes to running a Tumblr blog is this: can you keep this up long term? As anyone who has been in the social media field can tell you…a long-term commitment is critical to success.

Creating A Great Tumblr Name

After the marketing plan, your next step is to create a great Tumblr presence by coming up with a great name. And in the ecosphere of Tumblr, where users are younger and more fickle, a great name can make or break your marketing efforts.
But what makes a great Tumblr name? Something that is catchy, memorable and, if possible, short.
Let’s look at a few examples of some of the best Tumblr blogs to see what makes a great name:

• OCD: Obsessive Corgi Disorder  – Clever, descriptive name for the Tumblr blog that is all about the breed of dog.
• Awwccupy Wall Street – Photos of protestors who are really cute…like Dalmatian dogs.
• Accidental Chinese Hipsters – There tagline is: “A loving gaze cast upon the grandmother wearing dayglow jeggings and a visor.”

It’s also perfectly okay to use your brand name in order to maintain consistency with your brand. Mother Jones, Blackbook Magazine and Laughing Squid are all great examples.
It may not be a bad idea to keep the brand consistency because convincing your loyal followers to migrate to a new social media website will be easier to do if they recognize your name.

Create A Customer-Friendly Tumblr Blog

One of the worst mistakes that you can make when using Tumblr is to treat it like a marketing dumping ground.
You will never create a following using that strategy.
Some social media sites make for good business networking…LinkedIn or Twitter for example. But Tumblr is really kind of geared to the creative side of business. Tumblr users tend to be suspicious of any kind of marketing ploy…so if you come off heavy-handed, then you will not grow.
Instead, figure out what your target audience responds to…and then give it to them. Let me show you what I mean.
Coca-Cola

The soda company understands the Tumblr user…young, hip and interested in having fun in life. That’s why their “happiness is” Tumblr, shares content that is basically geared to things that will put a smile on your face.
The TODAY Show

This daily news show is really good about sharing content that expands upon current shows, almost like additional products. But it also posts videos and photos of their anchors doing funny things, keeping the promotion of the brand light and funny.
As you can see, even big brands and big media can use Tumblr to interact with a different segment of their market.

Focus On A Very-Tight Niche

Humor seems to work really well on Tumblr, especially if you can share content that is narrow, like the Tumblr that is dedicated to Cats That Look Like Ron Swanson .
But you don’t have to be funny necessarily to use Tumblr. You can narrow it down on your Tumblr blog to areas in your industry, such as the following

• SEO – Share graphs, charts and infographics on your Tumblr that you come across during your research…this way you are appealing to the visual rather than text (leave a textual focus for your normal blog).
• Technology – Share images and short reviews on a specific piece of electronic equipment – whether it’s something new like the iPad or even an antique server, it’s worth sharing.
• Social Media – Share pictures and short comments on tools you find that will help people effectively use social media.

How you use Tumblr is really only limited to your imagination. The key is to keep it creative and tightly-focused.

Creating Effective Tumblr Posts

Posting on Tumblr is pretty easy. It’s all about curating great content and then sharing it.  But don’t make the mistake so many marketer’s make and just post content for the purpose of posting content.
You might be able to accuse LIFE magazine of doing that, but if you look closely at their Tumblr, it really is very purposeful content.

People who read LIFE magazine will gravitate to the Tumblr because it speaks to their common interests and offers them additional information.
One trick I’ve learned that helps to create great content for Tumblr is to understand what are the common concerns and questions of your audience…and then deliver that kind of content.

3 Ways To Easily Make Your Tumblr More Accessible To Non-Tumblr Users

One thing I’ve seen a lot of Tumblr users do wrong is keeping their Tumblr blog closed to non-Tumblr users.
It’s a really bad strategy to expect people to adopt a new platform in order to engage with you. And while there are millions of people on Tumblr, I would recommend making your account accessible to everyone.
If you don’t tweak your account to allow non-Tumblr people to interact with you, then they will not be able to get updates, leave feedback or navigate your content.
To native users, it’s normal within Tumblr to do things like browse their dashboard, follow and reblog. But to outsiders, this is a strange rule they don’t understand.
You, as a marketer, have to help as many people as possible easily connect with your Tumblr.
For example, imagine one of your Tumblr posts goes viral…and you drive a ton of traffic to your Tumblr site. You cannot convert those non-Tumblr users into regular readers if you depend on the default Tumblr “Follow” button:

That will only slow down your prospect and makes things difficult for him or her…and as any internet marketer will tell you…speed is the name of the game online.
So, what do you do? Here are three steps.
Navigation
Tumblr blogs tend to be simple and clean, so navigation is pretty easy. Users can see in an instant what a Tumblr is all about.

This keeps people focused on your single stream of content, but one thing people can’t do is crawl through your content.
Neither does it highlight your best content.
One way to overcome this set back is to create pages devoted to categories like must see, most reblogged or most popular. You can also create category pages geared to media like audio or video.
The goal is to keep people on your Tumblr blog and reduce your bounce rate…and creating categories will help people navigate your site by making it stickier.
Alternative options to subscribe
I’ll go into greater detail in the section titled “How to build an email newsletter on Tumblr,” but let me say for starters that you need to provide options for people to subscribe using RSS or email.

For the RSS, you can use Google Feedburner.
The other subscribing option you will want to offer is by email. You can configure Feedburner to accept email subs for your content, but you can also use email service providers like MailChamp or Aweber.
These services will provide you templates to create email sign up forms:

The installs are ridiculously easy…and once you have them set up you probably won’t touch them ever again!
Leaving feedback
Comments are a big part of social interaction on blogs, but on Tumblr the natural thing to do is “Like” or reblog…then you can leave a comment.
As you can see, that leaves out anybody who doesn’t have a Tumblr account and just wants to leave a comment. .
To take care of that problem, then you will need to install Disqus on Tumblr. Disqus gives you a really open commenting feature so that anyone can leave a comment.
There are some really neat features about Disqus that make it worth the install:

• You can track replies.
• Moderate comments.
• Vote on the best comments so they rise to the top, which encourages people to leave better comments.

I’ll show you how to add Disqus to your Tumblr in the section called “How to add comments to your Tumblr blog.”
Another way non-Tumblr users can leave feedback is through other social media channels. Most Tumblr themes automatically include social share buttons, but if you are coding one yourself, make sure to include Facebook Like, Google+ and Twitter buttons so non-Tumblr users have another way to share your content.

How To Add Comments To Your Tumblr Blog

As I mentioned above, non-Tumblr users can not reblog, which also means they can’t comment. So what are you going to do?
Hopefully you are creating content that people want to comment on…whether they have a Tumblr or not. But you are going to drive people away…and possibly ultimately frustrate them and run them off forever…unless you give them the ability to comment.
Blogs and comments go together, but on Tumblr that’s just not the case…so you have to add a commenting feature.
The very best option for doing that now is by installing Disqus. It’s easy to do and Disqus will allow people to comment and reply even if they are not a Tumblr.
Here are the steps for installing Disqus on your Tumblr.

1. Get a Disqus account – Go to Disqus and click on the “Sign Up” button.


2. Fill out the sign-up form
   1. Site URL – This is your Tumblr’s URL “yourtumblrname.tumblr.com.”
   2. Enter site name – This is self-explanatory.
   3. Enter site shortname – This is going to identify you in Disqus’ database. In reality this is your password, so there are no spaces, but you can use numbers, letters and hyphens.
   
3. Register as primary moderator – This is all private information and will help you moderate all of the comments.


4. Install Disqus on your Tumblr – Inside your Tumblr dashboard…
   1. Go to “Customize” where you will see a list of options you can choose from. These options will be at the top of the page.
   2. Select “Appearance.”
   3. Find your Disqus shortname.
   4. Copy and paste that shortname into the Disqus shortname field.

And that’s it! You’ve successfully installed Disqus on Tumblr!  
Unfortunately, not all Tumblr themes support Disqus. If you do not find your shortname in your Tumblr account that means your theme doesn’t support Disqus.
You’ll have to manually install Disqus.

How To Get More Followers By Dominating Tumblr Search

Tumblr Search is a great way to find great content. As the title tag proclaims…it will make boredom go away:

But did you know that you can use Tumblr Search to increase your followers? It’s actually pretty easy to do since it only requires two steps from you: when to post and using the right tags.
Let’s first look at how search works on Tumblr.

Unlike Google search, Tumblr search relies on tags and not your typical search engine optimization tricks like keywords.
I searched for bicycles and it pulled up the most recent posts:

What this means is you need to figure out how to use tags correctly if you want to be the one who shows up in those searches.
The basics of Tumblr tagging
Tags are used to explain and categorize your content…giving you the ability to categorize and searchers a way to find your content.
Tags are easy to implement in your posts. Just create some tags in the box that sits in the right sidebar. The tags that are going to be used will show up in green below that.

Of course you have to choose tags that are relevant to the content of your post. And be careful, Tumblr will view excessive use of tags as spam and can even ban your blog.
I’ve found that between 7 and 12 tags is the optimum amount of tags that will not look like spam but will also draw a net wide enough to catch a lot of searches…and that’s the key…you want to end up in as many searches as possible!
It’s also important to realize that this means you should probably be posting content a lot. So the more content you post…and the more relevant tags that you use…the more you will appear in searches!
Let’s look at the timing of posts and how that can help you snag more followers.
The science of Tumblr posting at the right time
People have been exploring the optimal time to send electronic media for years. From email to a tweet, we want to maximize their efforts as much as possible.
Well, the same holds true on Tumblr.
The data that is coming in shouldn’t really surprise you. Remember when I told you that the Tumblr crowd tends to be younger…typically below 30 years old. That means the time to post is not going to be the same time to post on Facebook (which has an older crowd).
What the data is pointing to is that Tumblr posts get the most traction when they are posted on a schedule that matches the schedules of high school or college students… anywhere between late evening to early morning (8 PM to 2 AM).
There are three other times that are optimal:

• Before school starts – In other words, before 7 am.
• At lunch time – This is when people may be taking a break from their school work to take a peak at Tumblr.
• Right before dinner – This is the time when Tumblr users are out of school and have a little down time before dinner and a night of homework.

Naturally, you’ll need to test this out for yourself and find out the optimal time to post.
So how does this help you surge in Tumblr search? Easy. Since the search shows results for the most recent content…and not the most optimized…if you can post content when people are actually on Tumblr and searching you will increase your odds of showing up in the top spot…and get found.
But you can’t forget the great content. Just because you used the right tags and posted at the ideal time, having cruddy content will not get you more followers.
The interesting secret to going viral on Tumblr
Tumblr is really great for sharing short, punchy – cool content that doesn’t demand too much from the user. Unfortunately this makes creating viral content really hard.
Let me explain.
Most of the posts on Tumblr are cool images…but they are never really cool enough that you want to share. Or if it’s text, the common content share on Tumblr happens to be a quote. And unless it’s a really good quote, it’s probably not going to go viral.
If you want to up your chances of getting content to go viral, the secret is to publish a long post.
That may sound counter intuitive since short attention spans are pretty common on Tumblr, but the impact of something long coming across your visitors screen can be quite startling…getting them to pause and take notice.
At that point you’ve got them.
Here are some other reasons for creating longs posts on Tumblr:

• These long posts will usually drive a spike of traffic to your site as people are sharing them with others, thus increasing your followers.
• The long post of content also gives search engines like Google a lot of food to help index your site…where if all you did was share images or quotes (which are usually low in quantity and quality of copy) you would be depriving search engines of information. It’s important for your marketing efforts to show in both the Tumblr search and a Google search!
• Space out your long posts so that you are only sharing one every two to four weeks. Do it anymore than that and you can diminish the power they have to attract attention and go viral.
• Longer posts also tend to generate a lot more reblogs and comments since you are casting a wide net of ideas, which will appeal to a broader audience.

Speaking of SEO, let’s explore some other SEO aspects of Tumblr.
The basics of Tumblr SEO
Tumblr doesn’t rank well on search engines like typical blogging platforms. But there are a few tactics you can employ that will actually make your content search engine friendly.
Let’s explore.

• Optimize page titles – Yes, Tumblr will let you tweak your page titles using HTML. That may sound like more than you can handle, but it’s really pretty easy. All you have to do is input the name of the post, a short summary and the name of the Tumblr in the <title> tag of the actual post.
• Optimize meta descriptions – Next you can fill out the meta description tag in Tumblr so that you’ll get more exposure in search engines. This tag allows you to type in 160 characters and looks like this when it shows up in Google:
  If this tag isn’t optimized, then what will show up is the first 160 characters on your Tumblr post. That means if you don’t have any content on the page then you are missing the opportunity to give search engines something to index.
• Create custom post URLs – Tumblr has the option in your dashboard to create custom URL for your posts, whether it’s a photo, chat, link, video, quote or copy. This option is on the right hand side of your dashboard in the posting section. Spaces will be automatically changed to hyphens.  While this feature alone won’t necessarily send you screaming to the top of listings, it will give you a leg up. As each of these SEO tips are implemented…one SEO trick alone won’t change things…but you will see the accumulated effect!
• Add tags – I went into great detail about this in the section titled “How to get more followers by dominating Tumblr Search”, but need to mention it again in case you have not read this entire article and have skipped down to this section. Read it for more information.
• Optimize photos with the alt attribute – Did you know that you can enhance the SEO value of your photos…and no, I’m not talking about adding tags. What I’m talking about is the same thing when it comes to using the alt attribute on normal websites.  Content rules when it come to SEO-friendly photos, so name the files and fill out the alt attribute with keywords.
• Create a XML sitemap and submit it– Tumblr lets you create a site map, which is great for search engine spiders that crawl your site. But if you want to speed up that process and get spiders to crawl your site immediately, you’ll need to submit that site map to directories. Here’s how to do that:
  • Go to Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Add your Tumblr blog.
  • Add your site map.
  The process is the same for Yahoo! Site Explorer. If you want to submit it to Bing, which I recommend you do, then follow these steps:
  
  • Copy and paste this URL into your web browsers: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
  • Change www.YourWebAddress.com to your Tumblr domain name.
  • Press enter.

Finally, when it comes to optimizing your Tumblr blog for search engines you can’t forget the social aspect.
Search engines are looking more and more to social signals for the relevancy of content. So, make sure you’ve implemented social share buttons that both Tumblr and non-Tumblr users (explained in detail in “3 Ways To Easily Make Your Tumblr More Accessible To Non-Tumblr Users” section of this post) can spread your content with.

Conclusion

The last thing you need as a marketing manager or business owner is more confusion when it comes to social media. As you probably know, it seems like every day you are bombarded with the latest social media site you should join. If you’re like most people, it can get really confusing.
Hopefully this guide has shown you that Tumblr is a serious social media tool in marketing your company. Also, I hope that this guide has given you everything you need to succeed.
What other tips, techniques and ideas can you share about Tumblr that will help a marketer succeed?


About the Author: Neil Patel is the VP of Marketing of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.