A social media revolution seems to be happening all around us. But as companies are rushing to embrace social media, they frequently lose focus.

Everyone says that your business needs to utilize social media more, but how many people tell you how? This post is part of a series on different ways you can use social media to interact with your customers.

Tumblr, if you have not heard of it, is a microblogging site that has been said fall somewhere between Facebook and Twitter. Like Facebook, you can ‘Like’ posts.

Like Twitter, you can ‘Follow’ users and ‘Reblog’ their posts. But unlike Twitter, Tumblr does not have a 140 character limit. Actually, Tumblr tries not to limit you in any ways.

The platform has a heavy emphasis on ease of use and multimedia. It also does not limit the type of posts you can create. There are seven types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video:

Tumblr is popular among younger users, looking for humorous pictures and animations. Because of this, Tumblr has been underestimated in business use. But Tumblr has been especially important for the fashion and design industries and it’s time other industries follow. Here, we take a look at how certain activities on Tumblr will help your business.

1. Supplement or personalize your brand. – You can use your company’s Tumblr blog as an extension of your brand. A presence on yet another social network can just add more depth to your brand’s story. One possible way to do this is to use a Tumblr blog as a “behind-the-scenes” look into your company, similar to Mashable HQ. Mashable uses Tumblr to post pictures of employees, of the office, company news, and anything that can convey what the atmosphere is like at their headquarters.
2. Emphasize multimedia and utilize tags. – It’s been reported that half of all Tumblr posts are image-based. Take advantage of this and put extra effort into finding excellent pictures or other multimedia for your Tumblr posts. Not only will the great pictures make users want to reblog your posts more, but they will less likely to be passed over by people only paying attention to the pictures on their dashboard.
   Tumblr also has a tag feature that makes it easy to track certain topics. Users can explore and track tags from their dashboard. Unlike Twitter’s hashtags, tags are separated from the rest of the content and at the bottom of the post. Because of this, you don’t need to worry about using too many (as long as ALL of them are actually relevant to the post). It won’t make anything hard to read or put you over a character limit.
3. Highlight the best of your brand. – Use Tumblr to squeeze more life out of your content from elsewhere. Because of the emphasis on pictures and tags explained earlier, Tumblr can be use to re-purpose posts and use them to bring more people to the original content. For example, you can take your best blog posts, pick out an attention-grabbing picture and the post’s best paragraph or a description, and post that on Tumblr with several relevant tags. Just keep in mind that your audiences are different on all platforms, so only highlight content that your Tumblr audience will be interested in.

Follow us on Tumblr

Other posts in this series:

• 3 Ways to Interact on Facebook
• 3 Ways to Interact on Twitter
• 3 Ways to Interact on YouTube
• 3 Ways to Interact on LinkedIn
• 3 Ways to Interact on Google+