For a site that I was working on, I wanted a blogging platform that was easy to use and had the social aspect to it. For example this blog which is powered by WordPress remains disconnected from the rest of the world because I don’t promote my posts at all. The only visitors that I get here is people who have been referred from search engines, Google most importantly. This means I’m at the whims of Google for people to know what I’ve written.
Tumblr on the other hand has a very big user base who like to engage with other tumblers. If this blog was on Tumblr and I was using specific tags to describe my posts, I’m sure that I would get a good following and engagement from other people.
I decided to opt for a micro blogging platform for the following reasons:
Easier to get fans/followers and for people to engage with your blog
By joining a network with millions of users, it is easier to attract people interested in your content to become loyal to your blog. Take for example Facebook users, they are very willing to like and comment as long as they stay on Facebook.
No need to worry about disk space (can upload any amount of images at will)
Using a hosted CMS means that you need to monitor how much disk space you’re using. I usually optimise images before putting them on the web for 2 reasons – one to reduce the size so that it does not occupy more disk space than it should on my server and second because that decreases page load time and increase page speed. With an account on Tumblr or Posterous, I don’t need to worry about these things, although that’s recommended. I can now put images in blog posts as much as I want no matter how silly they are..
Can write as minimum as I want without worrying about SEO
As an SEO person, you know that you need to produce content of great quality to rank well in search engines. It makes sense but these type of content is difficult to produce and I’ve noticed that I’ve become less productive as a result. I no longer can write a quick post or have a post with just an image. People say that an image speak a thousand words but if you want organic traffic, you need to write that 1000 words along with the image to describe it.
However looking at Tumblr for instance, it seems that it’s not necessary for a post to be of a certain length (minimum number of words etc). You can have a short phrase, an image or anything else and have lots of comments, likes etc as long as your posts is seen by many people and is appealing. It’s all to do with the fans that you have. Some people can write a posts of a 200 words and have 50 comments on it. That solves the problem of SEO, right? The UGC, user generated content?
Tumblr is better because
- there are more users than posterous
- the users like to engage, like your content, reblog your posts (maybe because they are the younger generation and posterous users are oldies, above 55 I think the majority are)
- there are more themes to choose from
- it’s easier to use (from signing up to blogging, tumblr is much much simple than posterous)
The only thing I don’t like about tumblr is that you cannot get contributors to your main site. Oh well, one vote down against so many thumbs up…