October 14, 2015: Tumblr has been a blossoming community for quite some time; right now, more than 250 million blogs — and 121.2 billion posts — have made Tumblr home, although brands have only recently started to think seriously about Tumblr as a marketing platform. Our Tumblr recently celebrated its 1st birthday, and we love the creativity and unique content we get to see daily.
However, it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses on Tumblr. We’ve written about bad practices that we can’t stand on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now that we’ve been on Tumblr for a while (and have seen many rookie mistakes), we decided to list our pet Tumblr peeves:
GIF from giphy.com.
1. Removing or ignoring credit: This is the pet peeve I take the most issue with. Tumblr makes it extremely easy to share the source of your image/graphic, but many users skip this important step. I’ve seen my personal work pop up without credit, as well as the graphics we’ve made here at Didit. Yes, you should be posting a TON of images on Tumblr, but there are plenty of resources you can use that provide free images! Content theft is wrong, and you — and quite possibly the company you work for — could get in big trouble if it’s determined — perhaps at some future date — that you’ve stolen intellectual property.
GIF via giphy.com
2. Adding your contact information to every post: Surprisingly, we often see this error committed more often by small businesses and marketers than big companies. Adding your name and website information at the bottom of every post looks really tacky. Instead, if your theme offers a “description” area, add your links and information there.
GIF via giphy.com
3. Ugly Themes: Themes on Tumblr are so important. Pick something simple that offers versatility. Also: make sure your mobile site looks nice!
GIF via giphy.com
4. Too much self-promotion/ads: If your content stream is all ads, you’re better off sticking to Facebook. Tumblr users generally do not take well to spammers or spam-like behavior. Tumblr can enhance your content marketing efforts, but only if you creatively repurpose you content in ways that are interesting and eye-catching.
GIF via giphy.com
5. Memes that don’t make sense: I see this on every platform, but it’s especially cringe-worthy on Tumblr. If you don’t know what a meme means (or what a meme even is), stay away. You’ll only look even less cool if you mess it up (okay Dad?). Know Your Meme should be referenced more often.
GIF via giphy.com
6. Ugly Links: Tumblr, like WordPress, lets you highlight text in your Tumblr post and make it into a link. That’s great, but please stop putting ugly long links in your posts!
GIF via giphy.com
7. Boring or unoriginal content : Again, if you can’t provide original or interesting content, Tumblr is not for you. Avoid posting only text and links. Images/GIFs/video are necessary for success on this visually-oriented platform.
GIF via giphy.com
8. Bad tagging: Inappropriate tagging is so uncool. Just like on any other social media platform, if you tag your post with non-related tags in order to induce people view your page, you should consider an early retirement from social media.
GIF via giphy.com
9. No shares: Tumblr, first and foremost, is a community. Try to share/reblog other people’s content as often as possible. Share the love — you’d be surprised how much doing this makes people want to follow you!
Do you have a pet peeve that we missed? Tweet them @diditmarketing!
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