But while I’d been doing my best to reach that audience the organic way - reblogging relevant posts, sharing information about the book with my own followers, etc - it’s hard to get the traction needed if you don’t have a particularly substantial follower count. That suggested there was an audience on Tumblr who would find The Butterfly Assassin interesting. I knew, first of all, that my posts on Tumblr had convinced some long-term followers to buy my book, and also that a few people had followed me after reading the book, or had looked it up because of one of my posts. But as someone who has been on Tumblr since 2012, met some of their best friends there, and feels less alienated by it than by every other social media platform, I wanted to know if I could use it effectively for authorial advertising. It’s therefore not a website I’d recommend joining if your aim is to advertise yourself as an author. Mostly postgrads, in my experience, although that’s probably a side effect of hanging out in the academic corners of the website. Tumblr’s a community focused website suited to chaos, largely populated - at least in my circles - by broke 20- and 30-somethings. Tumblr users spot that a mile away, and have no interest in buying what you’re selling.

It’s one of the reasons the site has avoided becoming exactly like every other social media platform - and one of the reasons it’s stayed unprofitable, although the current staff strategy of convincing users to pay for utterly meaningless upgrades like covering their dashboard in small crabs seems to be a winner.Īs such, it’s not the kind of platform that’s well-suited to branded accounts trying to set themselves up to advertise to their followers. Famously described as ‘ soft, sad freaks on an unprofitable website‘, a description I think most of us took as a compliment, Tumblr users are highly resistant to being advertised to.

Rss follower count tumblr