Successful lesson from Tumblr

Community sharing is an invincible power if you make it the easiest thing possible.

Tumblr's micro-blogging service has just received a $ 85 million financial investment from Greylock Partners and Union Square Ventures, and backed by billionaire Sir Richardon Branson.

The investment comes amid the rapid growth of the Tumblr platform. In less than a year, Tumblr traffic has increased from 2 billion per month to 13 billion per month, and currently Tumblr has more than 30 million blogs. In early September, in the US alone, according to research firm comScore, Tumblr's independent traffic reached 13 million times a month, a 200% increase over the same period last year. Meanwhile, WordPress platform with nearly 60 million blogs, only about 2.5 billion visits per month.

Although WordPress owns a larger user base, Tumblr outperforms traffic, and these numbers continue to come to an extraordinary level: Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp talks to investors. and the founder of Hunch - Chris Dixon earlier this year, said the Tumblr network received about 250 million more visitors a week. The service of measuring Royal Pingdom traffic indicates Tumblr is approaching the threshold of 40 million posts a day, equivalent to 400 posts per second.

Tumblr's success contains many lessons for every media company, and the most important lesson is that community sharing is the unbeatable power if you make it the easiest thing to do.

Tumblr = Blog + Twitter

Tumblr is not really a blogging platform like WordPress and other similar services. In the way people ' tumbling ', Tumblr is more like Twitter's intersection and blogging than merely blogging. You can just create a blog, send the content you want, like WordPress or Blogger, you can just 're-blog ' (repost) posts from people you ' follow ', like the way Twitter users read and ' retweet ' ( repost ).

This is exactly the point of turning Tumblr into a very powerful tool when building and rebuilding content - like the way Twitter creates a spreading effect in a short period of time by users tweeting and retweeting them. link. According to the latest survey from market research firm Nielsen, Tumblr is the third largest social media tool in terms of use, just behind Facebook and Google Blogger, and is still growing aggressively.

When blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress appear and are popular, media companies discover web tools that can provide features that are only considered ' own ' of mainstream newspapers: the ability to Publish content quickly and allow readers to easily by RSS and other technologies. When blogging is more popular, some companies like TechCrunch or The Huffington Post show how powerful these tools are, and even some media companies are starting to take advantage of them internally.

'Easiest possible'

What Twitter or tools like Tumblr (Facebook) has done over the past few years shows that if creating content - or more importantly, sharing content - is as easy as possible, you'll get more people. more welcome. Therefore, considering the number of people who want to maintain WordPress or Blogger is too small compared to the number of people who want to use Twitter or Tumblr as an official tool to share content with others. The act of ' sharing activities with the community' is gradually becoming an important direction that giants or searchers like Google keep an eye on.

The perception of Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook is quite similar to the Amazon website. If Amazon makes buying goods online easy with just one click, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook allows users to share everything easily with simple click on the buttons: retweet, reblog, like . That drove a huge amount of online community activity, and there was no sign of slowing down.

If you are a media company, how simple is your company's content sharing level, not just a ' like ' button that integrates with Facebook, but also on other social networks? Tumblr's development shows how easy it is, the more popular it is.