Social Equity: The Big (Now Even Bigger) Value of Tumblr

Tumblr has long been a great tool when it comes to creating Social Equity, and recently it’s value increased even more.

At the beginning of the week, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo!, and the value of the social blogging platform increased significantly; and that is up from a significant value to begin with.

Blogging is one of the most crucial components to getting found online. Companies that blog get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads. Blogs are a great way of establishing your expertise and developing brand loyalists. We discussed the value of blogging in a Social Equity segment not long ago. The added value of Tumblr is the inherent social aspect.

Tumblr is a social network designed specifically for blogging. The value added to your business is derived from the existing base of readers (Tumblr users) and the integrated social sharing capabilities.

The Social Equity Derived from Tumblr

As noted above, there are two major factors that contribute to the Social Equity derived from your business’s use of Tumblr.

First, there is the existing readership. When you create a blog – either a standalone blog or one on your company’s website – you have to work at reaching a new audience. Essentially, you are one of the billions of pages on the web vying for the attention of a very distracted bunch. Furthermore, you are trying to get a group with an 8-second attention span to read a post containing several hundred words – that’s a tough goal to accomplish.

Tumblr’s existing user base of 216 million monthly visitors are coming for the express purpose of reading an article. The ability to optimize your blog and reach out to an already established audience means a great deal of time and effort saved, and a greater chance of showcasing your brand and expertise to an engaged audience.

Second, there is the social aspect that is inherent to Tumblr. As we mentioned, Tumblr is a social network. The ability to share your content across multiple networks and to reach an audience that expands far beyond your Tumblr followers is of great value. It means that you can quickly build your clout on the network (as well as others) and engage users on Facebook and Twitter (the two additional networks to which you can share your content directly from Tumblr) that might have otherwise never known you had a blog.

Tumblr’s New Value

The biggest news of the week was Yahoo!’s acquisition of Tumblr. While it is speculation at the moment, one can make a few educated assumptions about what that will mean for the future of the network.

As we have seen with Google+ and YouTube, social networks operated by search engines tend to be given heavier weight in search rankings. Therefore, we can safely assume that this same added weight will be given to Tumblr (with regards to tags, keywords, links, etc.) in Yahoo! search results in the very near future. This adds considerable value on top of what was already an impressive degree of Social Equity from the features above.

To read up on some additional facts and figures related to Tumblr, read this article.

Are you using Tumblr? Where do you see the value derived from your activity on the network? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!