Tumblr is surpassing WordPress

Tumblr is surpassing WordPress: what Tumblr’s success means for the future of social blogs; specially when Tumblr is compared with Twitter.

Initial thoughts brought on this article by FastCompany and a good explanation on what Tumblr is when compared with Twitter on Quora question on the matter, answered by Dan Goodswin, who runs the popular Total Film blog:

Tumblr is image based, Twitter is text based.

An image post on Tumblr is almost always more viral than a short text post, and pictures/GIFs are generally more popular than video/audio/link posts.

Although text and video are available on new Twitter, they still only represent a small number of tweets.

For this reason, Tumblr culture is heavily meme based, with fashion, photography and pop culture all heavily viral across the network.

A user on Tumblr is generally more engaged than a Twitter user, liking and reblogging being the basis of content on a large percentage of blogs, rather than original content.

Tumblr users are more active, with a far higher percentage of active accounts than Twitter, where up to 90% of accounts are unused or dormant.

Tumblr users are community oriented. It is much easier to find people with similar interests who post content that you enjoy than on Twitter, where a lot of first time users struggle to find peers to follow.

Tumblr is personality based, not celebrity based. This may shift slightly as more notable celebrities sign up, but personality, and the things you post, has a much higher importance. A celebrity that posts boring things or infrequently is unlikely to be popular.

Tumblr is voyeuristic. If people like your content, they will spend hours going through your archive, reading every page, every post of your blog. On Twitter once a Tweet is off the homepage people will generally never read it again.

Tumblr carries many advantages over Twitter, in terms of the community culture, merit-based popularity and engaged users, and not just in terms of the flexibility of content.

By sigmarfrota, you can also follow write on twitter @SignmarFrota