Last Tuesday, as a class, we went to Tumblr’s office in Playa Vista. It was an exciting experience to get to know the eco-system of Tumblr’s user base.

Tumblr is an easy platform for users to create content. It is also famous for being an outlet for GIFs. Tumblr is more like a creative community compared with other social platforms. According to Ben, the brand strategist at Tumblr, Tumblr has its own eco-system.

Users of Tumblr are serving different roles. They can be divided into three groups: creators, curators and consumers. Among them, curators are the power of Tumblr. They are the people who deliver and reblog all the contents created by the creators. They are the gate-keepers. They decided which contents are great to share and which are not.  Reblogging is a huge culture on Tumblr. Curators are those who reblog. In this way, they express their interests and acknowledge the contents publicly. According to Ben, among all the contents on Tumblr, creators create only 5% of the contents. The rest 95% of the contents are curated contents.

Within this eco system, there are also a lot of communities. Those communities overlap. For example people who are interested in fashion may also interested in make-up. So this creates an opportunity for brand to target on unconventional market.

Social media has been a great place for advertising. The result of the advertising can be easily measured on social media. The ad campaigns are precise and novel that can get more engagement of audience. Tumblr, as one of the advertising platform, is even better because this is a platform with social aspect, displaying function and native voice of the content. At Tumblr, advertisers can not only fing a publisher for their ads, they also can get in touch with a whole strategy and creative team to help them maximize the result of the advertising. As a content platform, Tumblr invites its artists to participate into the creative process of an ad campaign. With the promotion of Tumblr curators, content of an attractive ad campaign can have strong stickiness and the engagement of the content can be last for a long time.

Tumblr is a social media, a content platform, an ad publisher and a personal portfolio for creators. Those different aspects of Tumblr make it stand out among other social platforms.

Flickr / Photo by Esther Vargas.