Founded by David Karp in 2006 and blending the concepts of social network and blog, Tumblr has close to 200 million users worldwide. Posts on a user's personal blog land in the Dashboard of every other Tumblr user who follows them, boosting read counts that way, and thanks to Tumblr's retweet-like "reblog" feature, a post can suddenly become visible to hundreds of thousands of people at once.

Even though it's not yet in especially widespread use, some large multinational companies and brands — Disney, Coca-Cola, Vans, Apple, Adidas, Glamour, Barbour among them — have already discovered Tumblr's power. With 15 billion monthly pageviews and 120 million unique visitors (7 million of them from Turkey), the site must have caught Yahoo!'s attention too, since the company folded it into its portfolio with a $1.1 billion acquisition.

While the large majority of its users live in the US, it also has no small number of users among 14–24 year olds in Turkey. The fact that it hasn't yet been discovered by any major Turkish brand, and has so far been overlooked by the dozens of large Turkish companies who set their target audience as young people, will certainly put whichever brand dares to make the first move a step ahead of the rest.

One of Tumblr's biggest advantages for brands is that content keeps landing back on the dashboard through reblogs, even months later. That means the content used stays in constant circulation, giving the audience it reaches far more frequent visibility than a Facebook or Twitter post would. Tags added to posts can also deliver strong visibility in Google searches. This lets content spread well beyond Tumblr itself, to the point where it can turn up in almost any internet search.

What Should Brands' Tumblr Strategy Be?

Brands with a young target audience and a dynamic image in particular can build a connection with young people by posting content that's current and keeps a relative distance from corporate stiffness, to communicate directly with that audience. To do that, brands need to keep up with current Tumblr jargon and avoid coming across as distant from their audience. Every brand has its own key strategy for using a given social network; on Tumblr, that key strategy absolutely has to be "authenticity."

Which Sectors of Local Brands Could Make the Most of Tumblr?

In our country, where brands' competitive social media landscape is essentially limited to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Tumblr could offer an ideal experience for innovative, trailblazing brands wanting to run activity aimed at a young target audience. The sectors of brands that shouldn't overlook it can be listed as follows:

Personal care products

Youth fashion

Footwear

Telecommunications companies

Hot and cold drinks

Chocolate and snacks

Watches

Jewellery

Mobile apps

Despite not having been sufficiently explored so far, Tumblr hasn't escaped the notice of the handful of brands that have correctly identified their market research and target audience, and it's moving a step closer, day by day, to becoming part of brands' social media activity here too. In this process, it's down to brands to think about the future and decide, genuinely, who they want to sell to.