1. Social Media Tools Presentation: Tumblr By: Allison White

2. Type of Tool Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Tumblr is able to be used on any smart phone, laptop, and tablet.

3. History of Tumblr Development of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between Contracts at David Karp’s software consulting company, Davidville. Karp had been interested in tumblelogs for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own tumblelogging platform. Tumblr was launched in February 2007 and within two weeks, the service had gained 75,000 users. In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas. Adidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. This launch was only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. David Karp will remain CEO and the deal was finalized on June 20, 2013.

4. Use of Tumblr in business and technical communication Tumblr celebrates creativity. We want you to express yourself freely and use Tumblr to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, and stand for. Tumblr is the best place for creators to find an audience for their content – There are 202 million blogs on Tumblr, and 70% of our users say the dashboard is their favorite place to spend time online.

5. Use of Tumblr in business and technical communication The dashboard makes it easy for people to discover and share your content. – Tumblr is for creating and sharing content. 94% of the posts people make are reblogs of content they find here.

6. Use of Tumblr in business and technical communication Brands are welcome as creators themselves with content users want to see. – Tumblr is ranked #1 in social sentiment towards brands. 95% of users who follow one, recommend them to others.

7. Potential issues with Tumblr Tumblr has been experiencing its fair share of scaling issues, the service has boomed substantially over the past year and is facilitating 200m pageviews a week. Tumblr is fighting a battle for users with Posterous and WordPress in the blogging market, Posterous already offers an easy way to port content from a number of other services, which Karp tersely points out.

8. Companies and businesses that make good use out of Tumblr Lulu Frost uses Tumblr as their main blog to announce their latest collections through beautiful fashion photography. Photos go beyond just their accessories to include images from their travels to fashion and trunk shows. They also insert the occasional inspirational quote and share humorous vintage photos on Fridays. Scribner Books uses Tumblr as their main blog to appeal to the literary lovers who buy books published by their company. Their posts include announcements for upcoming book releases, quotes from popular books, and shares from other blogs with images of movies made from books. Boqueria Resturant use Tumblr as their main blogging platform to share the stories and recipes behind their popular menu items. Their posts range from the culture behind a special dish, how their chefs select meats and ingredients, and detailing the history of their wine collection. eBay uses Tumblr as one of several blogs they maintain. The Inside Source features interviews, creative uses for items sold on eBay, inspirational quotes, brand mentions that link to eBay’s current auctions of their products, and much more. The goal is to keep eBay users up to date on current trends.

9. Companies and businesses that make good use out of Tumblr Sherpaa Healthcare uses Tumblr as their main blog to educate individuals and businesses about the latest health-related news. They share videos, posts about their company from other blogs, interviews, and real-life health case studies (with permission from the patients). They occasionally break up the seriousness of their content with cute images of dogs wearing their logo t-shirt. Sephora uses Tumblr as their main blog to showcase their latest products and videos on how to use them. They have celebrity appearances by Kat Von D and Jennifer Aniston who talk about how they use Sephora products and the results they achieve. Their posts also include animated graphics, info graphics, and behind the scenes footage of photographers capturing their produc Shapeways uses Tumblr as their main blog mostly to share their latest Instagram photos along with occasional features pointing back to their main website. It goes to show that you don’t necessarily have to create new, unique content for your Tumblr. Integration with Instagram can go a long way.

10. Popularity of Tumblr As of October 5, 2014, Tumblr hosts over 205.9 million blogs. The company's headquarters is in New York City. Yahoo! announced its intention to acquire Tumblr on May 20, 2013, for approximately $1.1 billion.

11. Current Users of Tumblr When Yahoo announced its $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, May 20,2013, it said David Karp’s blogging platform had more than 300 million unique vistors. But that’s not the same as a “user” number, at least not in the way that modern-day social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook talk about user numbers. When those guys talk about about users, they’re generally talking about “active users” — people who have created accounts on their networks, and are using those accounts to access the services’ core functions.