Is Tumblr the next big thing? 3 reasons to join the fastest-growing social platform

In less than a year, Tumblr has gone from being “Yahoo!’s next problem” to the fastest-growing social platform. The Yahoo-owned platform is considered an easy blogging tool for users and companies looking to engage with a younger and increasingly mobile audience. TechCrunch recently dug into research from the Global Web Index to shed some light on the changing social landscape, which shows that Tumblr’s active user base grew by 120 percent in the last six months, while Facebook’s only grew by 2 percent.

That kind of growth is nothing to sneeze at, as Marissa Mayer and her team knew when Yahoo! purchased the platform in May of 2013. Yahoo! pointed to growth as a huge driver in this acquisition, and noted that brands are hungry to engage with users of the platform.

The latest results from the Global Web Index are good news for brands looking to use Tumblr. Here are a few reasons why:

Tumblr has an active, engaged user base.

PR practitioners will know that you want to post content where people will engage with it. Tumblr’s huge growth in active users means that the site represents a pool of users looking to interact with content – re-blogging and sharing your posts with their followers. Tumblr users also reportedly spend more total time on the site than on bigger networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest. Companies like Adidas use Tumblr to engage with customers through good interactive design and the humor behind the Denny’s brand comes through on their Tumblr blog.

The platform is rich in multimedia content.

Multimedia and visually engaging content is a huge draw to Tumblr users, who spend more time creating shareable content and connecting with other users via the platform’s built-in social network. At InkHouse we’ve learned that visually engaging content is a great way to connect with readers. Tumblr makes this easy. For example, users frequently engage with posts by General Electric, one company consistently sharing stunning visuals and multimedia graphics on Tumblr, proving that many short, informal posts are fantastic for driving engagement.

Tumblr users are flocking to mobile devices.

Tumblr has invested in making the mobile experience user-friendly and beautifully designed, and it’s paying off. A huge number of Tumblr users are accessing the site from a mobile device – 65 percent of active users, up from 50 percent in January – which is not surprising since “mobile is the social platform of choice for more than 50 percent of users ages 16-34,” according to the Global Web Index. This same age group makes up more than 70 percent of users on Tumblr and Instagram (the youngest audiences out of all social networks). With mobile rising to become a first-choice device for many social network users, brands should consider getting in front of a growing population of young, engaged consumers.

As if you need another reason to open an account, Tumblr is SEO friendly as well. Web marketing expert Lorrie Thomas Ross points out on PR Newswire that “Tumblr was architected to be search-friendly and help search visibility.”

So what are you waiting for? By creating a Tumblr blog for your company or brand you will join an active, engaged community and have the opportunity to reach more mobile users with multimedia content than ever. As we say at InkHouse, now is the time to jump right in and “publish, publish, publish.”