Tumblr began slowly three years ago, but the social platform has been picking up speed — now running over a billion page views a month with 4.5 million users. If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, it’s a simple blogging platform (think stripped-down WordPress) that let’s you “reblog” stuff from other people and follow your favorite bloggers.
Over the past few months, media companies have dipped their toes in Tumblr waters. Newsweek was the first to get a lot of attention — and now others have followed, including the TODAY Show, NPR and the HuffingtonPost (and a new one from NBC News that’s a little less conventional than you might expect).
So should news organizations start their own Tumblrs? Traffic referrals are still on the low end of the social scale, and it requires manual effort. But it does reach a new, quickly-growing audience that enjoys a fresh, conversational approach. To us, if you have a few minutes a day to give, by all means go for it — but if you’re not going to keep it updated (or you’re going to abandon more critical efforts, like Facebook) — then perhaps just reserving a Tumblr name and letting it sit until you can give it the attention it deserves may be the more prudent approach. What do you think? Let us know in comments…
(Disclosure: I work at msnbc.com, which helps run the TODAY and NBC News Tumblrs).