Making Tumblr work for museums
I was first introduced to Tumblr by my sister. I knew it had something to do with blogs, GIFs, memes and teenage obsessions. My sister’s Tumblr was mostly Led Zeppellin-themed. I was unimpressed.
She then told me that one of her posts had over 200,000 notes.
Oh
I thought
Maybe the Museum should be on this.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tumblr, it’s best described as a social blogging website. You post a blog in one of six types - Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video (you can also insert audio, video and photos into a Text post) - and then you tag it with searchable hashtags. You can follow other blogs and everyone can reblog each other’s content onto their own blogs.
Your blog looks bloggy at first glance. It has a URL and you get to customise how it looks, but the real experience is the Tumblr dashboard (shown above). The dashboard functions much like Twitter: there’s a constantly updated feed of blogs you follow and where you can Like other posts and reblog them, with the option of adding your own comment as a caption. Tumblr also features blogs in trending categories, and you can search hashtags or topics for blogs or posts which interest you.
In the world of blogging you usually need a committed or large following to have comments and interaction on your institution’s blog; very often, a blog can turn into an information dump, something which is browsed but not dwelt in.
People interact on Tumblr. It is where people dwell, not visit. It’s a diverse community where each person’s blog is an expression of their interests and personality.
Infographic from Adweek.com.
The community is fairly young, and the content reflects this. The effects of both the Social Media and post-recession age are very apparent in the tone and humour prevalent on Tumblr; people are often self-deprecating and nihilistic. They celebrate both the mundanity of life in the modern, youth-punishing West but also the escapism that fandoms of comics, films and celebrities offer. It is a complex website full of niches, invention and creativity. A person can reblog your post on basket-weaving one minute, and repost soft pornography the next.
It is this world into which I blundered in 2014 with @unirdg-collections. Going against all the rules of social media planning, my strategy consisted of a simple plan:
See how it goes.
The blog was launched against an existing backdrop of frustration with Facebook, Twitter and blogging. Hours of work on Facebook posts are punished by alogrithms that mean only your mom and one stranger end up seeing your content; Twitter offers no opportunity to deal with a topic in-depth; blogs were wonderful, but often constrained by (necessary) rules on tone, word-length and audience.
Tumblr allows freedom to tell stories in a far more dynamic way. Posts can be a single picture that tells a thousand words, they can be long-form blog posts, they can be a GIF essay. Tumblr allows personality and punishes a corporate, bland voice. The audience is a broad spectrum but are almost always provocative, interesting and eager to explore the curious, the cute and the captivating. To appeal to them, you must speak their language.
Could I use GIFs?
Yes.
What about stupid GIFs?
Even better.
Do we have to be educational?
Let’s call it 60/40 between education and conversation.
The learning curve was steep. I very quickly realised that linking to our blog wasn’t going to cut it, nor was taking for granted a basic interest in our material. Not being boring is a lot more difficult than it sounds when you’re trying to catch the attention of a young audience with, say, the national collection of English farm wagons. I had to work for their interest.
We found the key to be enthusiasm, a good hook and interaction. Since August 2014 we can point to the success of our Strategy (yes, I did eventually write one). We have been made Trending by Tumblr on a few occasions, meaning our content was put in front of millions of their users. Individual posts have trended in categories such as GIF and Text. Our post on the MERL dead mouse went viral. We were chosen to be featured in the Spotlight History category, which means our blog will be suggested to every new user of Tumblr. I’ve since poured all of this experience into the new Tumblr for the Bodleian Libraries (@bodleianlibs), which has experienced more success in its first two months than the first year of the @unirdg-collections blog.
The process was a long one. We began by recycling content from Instagram and our blogs using IFTTT, as well as trying our hand at memes. We threw ourselves into the well-developed GLAM community on Tumblr, reblogging others’ content, sharing best practice and even curating an annual ‘Best Of’ list in 2015.
As we saw what worked well for other accounts, we began adapting our content to what the community obviously enjoyed. I began writing original content intended for Tumblr first and foremost and embarked on the steep learning curve of GIF-making. The aim is to use GIFs to enhance the understanding of an object:
We also began to find our niche, targeting certain posts at communities involved with libraries, numismatics and typography. My colleague from the Typographic Collections began a monthly feature called Typography Tuesday, a beautifully illustrated, themed series which has been consistently popular.
Eventually the hard work paid off. A few posts after our 500th, we were featured by Tumblr on their radar. The post was a photograph of a slide depicting Coventry, a favourite chosen from the many our volunteers had catalogued that day:
Quite cheekily, I had also been emailing the editors of Tumblr telling them how amazing our blog is. Tumblr is so vast, I was afraid of being lost in the noise.
Whether the email worked or we were picked up another way, the effect of the Rader cannot be exaggerated. With this exposure came exponential growth in likes and new followers in the following months. We capitalized on it with a special feature on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, with specially-made GIFs exploring his illustrations:
We also began making posts not necessarily educational, but which chimed with popular aesthetics on Tumblr. A post which continues to gather notes months after it was posted is this simple GIF of a rainy day in Reading:
Equally, we approached memes in a different way. People on Tumblr don’t take any fools. Your content either has to be intentionally awful so as to be funny or of a high quality. We did both, but to varying degrees of success:
Very often it depended on posting the right thing at the right time when the right person notices it and reblogs it. As on any social network, power users are incredibly important at amplifying what we do, and we have a select few whose reblogs never fail to boost our content. One such power use is @thegetty, who boosted this GIF to nearly 500 notes:
What next for our Tumblr? Well, we continue to post the most interesting content we can, though now that I share my week between Reading and the Bodleian Libraries, it’s the @bodleianlibs account which now takes up most of my time. Social media was never an official part of my job at Reading, whereas it explicitly is at the Bodleian.
Platforms like Tumblr require commitment but also ‘content champions’ – the people working with historic objects, books and archives every day who can communicate interesting hooks succinctly and imaginatively. Finding those content champions and building our Tumblr into a leading light for the sector is the aim for the future, and for now we keep experimenting. The imagination of other museums, libraries and collections on Tumblr continue to inspire us.
The @unirdg-collections Tumblr is also the most-followed social media account we have, with a global and engaging community we cherish being involved with. We’re excited for the future.
