MARK 360 Assignment 1: Research and Evaluation of Tumblr Marketing

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Tumblr as a social media marketing tool. It begins with a company background, including its launch date, parent company, and service type as a microblogging and social networking platform. The report then delves into Tumblr's business model, explaining its revenue streams through advertisements, sponsored posts, and marketplace features. It provides statistics on registered and active users, highlighting the platform's growth and key milestones. The functionality and features of Tumblr are then explored, including content types, character limits, and the use of hashtags. The report evaluates Tumblr's effectiveness for marketing purposes, discussing its benefits, such as microblogging and direct customer interaction, and its limitations, such as the potential for inappropriate content. The report also includes examples of successful and unsuccessful marketing campaigns on Tumblr, drawing conclusions about its overall value as a marketing tool for businesses, especially small and medium enterprises. Finally, the report is concluded with references.

Running Head: Social Media And Marketing
SOCIAL MEDIA AND MARKETING

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Table of Contents
1. Company background..................................................................................................................3
2. Business model of the company providing the service...............................................................3
3. Functionality and features............................................................................................................6
4. Evaluation of the tool for marketing purposes............................................................................9
References......................................................................................................................................15

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1. Company background
Name of the service that is selected for this assignment is Tumblr. This social media service is
a microblogging and social networking website. URL of this social media service is
https://www.Tumblr.com. Date of launch of this service is February 19, 2007, and this social
media service was founded by David Karp (Tumblr.com, 2019). The parent company of this
service is Verizon media and it’s headquarter is located in New York City. Currently, it is owned
by Oath Inc (Yahoo). It provides various types of services to its users, which includes
microblogging. This service allows business users to post different attractive multimedia and
other meaningful contents in a short-form blog. Moreover, different users of Tumblr can also
follow other users in the business community. In this social media service, users can also do
private blogging (Tumblr.com, 2019). In addition, queuing of posts is another essential service of
this social media channel. Users can set up a proper schedule for delaying their posts regarding
products or services. Other services like tagging potential audience and HTML editing can be
performed by this innovative service. Messaging is another essential service that is provided by
Tumblr. Therefore, direct interaction with the audience can be performed by a business user and
hence facilitating the marketing process.
2. Business model of the company providing the service
Just like other social media channels, Tumblr makes money through targeted advertisements
by utilizing huge user base. These are sponsored posts that are placed on user’s dashboard.

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Figure 1: Sponsored post on Tumblr
(Source: Tumblr.com, 2019)
Tumblr social media service earns $15.1 million per year mostly from advertisements that run on
this platform (Tumblr.com, 2019). However, the revenue is dropping as the company is losing
popularity gradually. The sponsored day is another way of making profit adopted by Tumblr. In
this process, brands can own a day at Tumblr through buying a cross-platform exclusive
promotion. The business brand gets featured on the homepage and in the dashboard of other
users.

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Figure 2: Sponsored day
(Source: Tumblr.com, 2019)
Tumblr also makes money by hosting a proper market place in which users can sell and buy
themes for blogs. Moreover, Tumblr also gives a chance to its users to promote their posts for $1
(Tumblr.com, 2019). Paying this amount can help users to highlight their posts on the dashboard
of followers. This social media service site also makes money through sponsored applications. If
a user clicks on sponsored gaming or other mobile applications, then they will be taken to play
store directly for downloading those applications.
Tumblr has nearly 441.4 million registered blogging accounts. In 2018 they have 391 million
registered accounts that have increased at the beginning of this year. This social media site has
526 million daily active users and 642 million monthly active users.

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Figure 3: Active users of Tumbler and other social media sites
(Source: Tumblr.com, 2019)
Within two weeks of incorporations of Tumblr, 75000 users were gained. In 2012, featuring of
major brand advertisement campaign was done. In 2013, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1
billion. Later in 2017, Verizon communication acquired Yahoo and Tumblr. In 2009, official
iPhone app of this site was launched. It was found that 38.69% of total users are millennial and
main age group who visits Tumblr is between 18-29 years.
3. Functionality and features
Tumbler allows users to post various kinds of primary media including images, GIFs, links,
videos, mp3s, and text posts. Aim of this organization is to provide a better experience to users.
For this reason, they have developed their site for being capable to allow all kinds of primary
media. Constraints of this site included limited character per message. Business owners can
write up to 4096 characters for the marketing of their products and services. Users cannot use

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Not Safe for Work (NSFW) to promote their brand and it can be considered as a constraint of
using Tumblr. Forbidden content including adult contents is not allowed to be posted on
Tumblr. It has been found that near about 17% of blog on this social site contained pornography
in 2013 (Static.Tumblr.com, 2019). However, this company has taken initiative to prevent this
kind of posts. Tumblr maintains reciprocal relationships with business owners. They provide a
chance for marketing and in return, business owners provide value to this company by sharing
the experience of using this site with other business people. Tumblr offer users to set up private
blogs if they already have a primary public blog. It allows secondary blogs to be private and
those private blogs can be followed by a selected audience (Tumblr.com, 2019). This social
media site has ensured algorithmically stream that allow it to examine content posted by users. It
is mainly used for processing streaming of data. For example, algorithmically controlled
streams of Tumblrs are preventing users to post adult content and it acts like the algorithm of
YouTube.

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Figure 4: Growth of Tumblr indicates its effectiveness as a marketing tool
(Source: Contently.com, 2019)
Tumblr suggests users use #Hashtag as it helps others to use these hashtags in the internal
search engine of this social media site for searching a particular subject. Short-form blogs are
default in Tumblr and business owners may create customized URLs of promotional posts.
Tumblr only supports setting up verified accounts with original identity and they prevent
anonymous submission. However, business owners may act anonymous, if they provide incorrect
personal details to this social media channel. This social media channel is considered as an

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effective marketing tool as it allows its users to create business accounts. Once a person opens
a private account in Tumblr, is allowed to create a secondary private account. According to
Motta & Barbosa (2018), possessing a private account helps business organizations to focus on
customized marketing for improving sales percentage. It is easier to follow simple steps to create
a Tumblr business account.
Tumblr does not take money for posts made on this channel for promotional purposes. However,
it offers business owners to pay for showing up their posts on the dashboards of Tumblr
users other than their own followers. Besides free themes, this social media channel allows
creating paid themes for marketing. Business metric including transparency report is released
by Tumble. This organization is helping with five metrics to help in tracking the success of the
business (Unionmetrics.Tumblr.com, 2019). Note volume, size of the community, reblogs,
average notes per post and follower growth on Tumblr help business owners to evaluate the
effectiveness of their marketing activities on Tumblr.
4. Evaluation of the tool for marketing purposes
Tumblr is a popular social media marketing tool that is used by many businesses, which allows
them to conduct microblogging. As stated by Sahu, Nanda & Baral (2016), microblogging helps
businesses to share essential posts quickly and conveniently on social networks. Moreover,
different attractive contents like media, videos and website links can be shared in this site, which
helps in attracting targeted audience easily. This increases convenience of the process of
marketing for business owners. On the other hand, Tumblr is free for business organizations to
use that helps them to conduct marketing operations at fewer costs. Hence, different marketing
activities can be done by investing less costs and more revenue can be earned. Tumblr is an open

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social networking site that can be accessed by both customers and marketers (Tumblr.com,
2019). This allows creating a place of interaction between customers and marketers. Direct
interaction helps to establish a good relationship between them. Feedback can be collected by
using the messaging feature of this site and incorporated to improve service. In contrary, Boman
& Raijonkari (2017) stated that this site has helped the process of online marketing. It can be
seen that unique tagging feature of this site helps to attract potential audience and a post can be
popular easily and in a faster way.
In addition, it can be seen that business organizations can be able to increase branding through
social media sites. Different popular companies like Nike and Apple has chosen this site to
increase branding, especially of new brands. As stated by Afolabi, Ojelabi & Oyeyipo (2018)
promotion of brands can be done easily in social media platforms due to the presence of a large
number of users. Different quality contents can be posted in this platform that includes
information about the products, reviews given by celebrities on other platforms like Twitter and
other platforms. In addition, different marketing campaign videos and photos can be posted on
this social media site. Hence, vast promotion and branding of new and existed products and
services can be done through Tumblr that helps to increase the competitiveness of a product. On
the other hand, Icha & Agwu (2015) argued that Tumblr can also help business organizations to
increase views and visits of customers and on their shopping sites and WebPages. Sharing on the
link with attractive ads on Tumblr helps to increase traffic on WebPages. This feature of this
social media service helps business organizations to popularize their services in a quick span of
time. Increasing traffic on WebPages helps to increase the sales rate of desired products. Hence,
marketing strategies can be successfully implemented through this popular social media
marketing tool.

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This social media site has proven very useful for marketing purposes of small and medium
enterprises. As said by Ihejirika, Goulding & Calvert (2017), a small business can use different
social media tool for communicating and attracting the target audience. Moreover, those
businesses that target millennial can use this platform because the majority of users in this
platform are under 35. A business organization can design an effective theme, which includes
attractive logos and tag line. The professional-looking theme is very essential in this platform for
achieving success. Unique content can be shared through microblogging that can help the small
business firm to achieve popularity and revenue in a short time.
Different business organizations like Nike have launched different marketing campaign on this
social media site. They have used the unique features like tagging and sharing online links to
popularize different products. Different essential information such as, products details are
published in this social media site that became popular. Other details like benefits of purchasing
products of this brand are also published through Tumblr. Another popular company apple has
used this social media site in a proper way. In 2014, they have released a campaign for iPhone
5C. Different colorful photos and songs are featured on their blogs. Moreover, they have used
sponsored posts to feature their posts on other users’ dashboard.

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Figure 5: iPhone 5C advertisement on Tumblr
(Source: Tumblr.com, 2019)
Moreover, different luxury brands like Lexus have also adopted social media marketing and
incorporated through Tumblr. This luxury brand has initiated an award-winning campaign called
"The signal". This business organization has focused on creating ads that are related to fashion.
In addition, entertainment organization like MTV has also chosen Tumblr for attracting target
audiences. They have shared different attractive images, twitter screenshots of celebrities and
GIFs to attract young generation individuals.