The Practice team are recent converts to Tumblr, the social media site home to over 108 million micro-blogs. We’ve discovered that the platform not only offers an additional outlet for online content, but that it also provides a wealth of creative inspiration. With this in mind, how can brands use it to maximise their digital presence?

Like Instagram and Pinterest, Tumblr is perfect for image-based content; in fact, photo posts were found to receive a greater number of notes and “reblogs” than other content, hence why 83 per cent of posts include pictures. It’s also the perfect site to integrate nicely into your company’s social media structure, with permalink pages that link back to your website and other blogs and social media pages. And now, Yahoo’s 1 billion dollar acquisition of the platform means brands will be able to benefit from on site advertising, as Yahoo plan to launch search ads as well as ads that bloggers can run themselves.

So what have we learnt from being on Tumblr for a short while? We’ve learnt to make it an extension of The Practice brand- and that means using our consistent imagery and font that we’ve customised for our page. Like on Twitter, Instagram, and now even Facebook, relevant hash tagging is essential to reach your desired audience, as is exploring those hash tags to see what target users and competitors are also posting under the same tags. Tumblr is also about themes, which means all brands should aim to use it to create a story. For us, that’s based on visual design, graphics, art and architecture, where we feature our own digital designs, showcase our projects, and reblog similar posts we find inspiring. Frequent and well-tagged posts are also key for maintaining exposure, and hopefully generating an increasing stream of followers. Ultimately, a meaningful Tumblr campaign will be visually appealing and inspirational to a company’s demographic.

So which brands have a firm grasp on the micro-blogging site? Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola is up there with the best, drawing upon brand imagery to aid the theme and title of its page, “Where happiness lives online.” In particular, the company uses a wide variety of GIFs and leads the way in creating unique content as opposed to simply reblogging- something that many other Tumblr blogs rely on. Coca-Cola’s blog aims to visually speak to its younger demographic (mostly under 25s) by telling “the story of happiness” in order to provide a daily dose of uplifting inspiration. Such is the brand’s page success that last year, Tumblr selected one of Coca-Cola’s posts, “The never-ending pour” to feature on its home page; as a result, it received a record breaking 20,000 likes and reblogs. Another exemplary account is Disney’s, which infuses its page with a little cartoon magic in line with current events. For example, the company celebrated the recent royal birth with images of animated babies from its classic films. To us, the reason why both these companies excel on Tumblr is because they create content that draws upon youth and playfulness, allowing them to resonate with the site’s younger audience.

Do you have a personal Tumblr blog, or use the site for your business? And do you think brands can greatly benefit from having an account? We’d love to hear your tips, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital, and share your thoughts on our Facebook page. And don’t forget to follow us on Tumblr too!