We recently highlighted the different advertising options available via Twitter’s paid ads and promoted tweets platform. Another massively popular social site has also been introducing new advertising options of late: Tumblr. For many businesses, Tumblr’s currently available advertising options may not be a great fit yet, but it’s always worth understanding what’s available with a given advertising channel before you dismiss it, and by following how a popular platform with a lot of visitors evolves their ad products you’ll know when they start to offer solutions that you can get the most out of.
Currently, Tumblr offers four separate ad products:
Tumblr Highlighted Posts
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Highlighted posts allow users to designate their own Tumblr posts to be highlighted in your followers’ dashboards. The price is currently $2 but was $1 upon launch. If you have active Tumblr followers and content you’d like to get additional exposure for, this can be an interesting way to do it.
Tumblr Spotlight for Brands
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The pricing for this product isn’t publicly disclosed, but the idea here is a brand can sponsor a spotlighted topic page like fashion or sports and have their ads shown to anyone who visits that page. Many Tumblr users view content this way so it can be a way for brands looking for high-volume exposure on social sites to get access to large numbers of visitors.
Tumblr Radar
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Tumblr Radar allows brands to buy display units in the right rail of users' dashboards. Similar to Facebook ads promoting Facebook pages, these ad units allow users to like, follow, and reblog brands’ content.
Tumblr Pinned Posts
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Pinned posts are the newest paid advertising product from Tumblr, announced in late June. Similar to Tumblr highlighted posts, with pinned posts for $5, users can pin posts to the top of followers' dashboards. Highlighting the post simply puts a marker next to it in followers’ dashboards, where as pinning the post means that it hovers at the top of your followers’ dashboards for 24 hours.
The spotlight and radar products are geared more towards brands and require a $25,000 commitment, but the pinned posts and highlighted posts are both available to advertisers self-serve, so if you already have an active Tumblr account with followers this might be a viable advertising option. Regardless of the tactic you choose it’s definitely important to take into account that with a young advertising platform like Tumblr’s you won’t be able to get access to the level of targeting features and analytics you might be used to with Google AdWords, or even Facebook advertising. That said depending on your audience and your company’s own use of Tumblr, Tumblr ads could be worth investing in.
Images courtesy of Mashable.com
About the Author
Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM LLC, a boutique Boston, MA SEO and PPC agency offering search marketing consulting services including pay-per-click account management, a comprehensive SEO audit, content marketing strategy, reputation management for SEO and link building services and strategies for a variety of specific niches such as B2B SEO services.
You can learn more about how Measured SEM can help your business by getting in touch with Tom directly via email at tom at measuredsem.com, or by following him on Twitter.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.