Winning on Tumblr for My Politics Forum

I have been playing around with social networks lately to see if I can drive traffic from them or at least build an audience. I wanted to share some short-term success about Tumblr. I decided to open a Tumblr for my forum and integrate dlvr.it with the posts we create and the content we manually add to the Tumblr account as well. It's been a very fun 6 weeks since we started it.

I started the page around the 16th of August and my goal was to follow 500 people posting about politics since that is what my forum is about. Why 500? I don't know, just seemed like a big enough number to start with, but it's not easy. I used all the keywords I could think of to find that many. I think in the end I managed 450. I know a lot of them aren't going to follow me back so I had to go big upfront and shed the weight later.

I got about 75 followers at this point, 6 weeks later, but those followers are awesome! They like and reblog a good percentage of my stuff and even check out my forum when topics of interest come. In 6 weeks and not actively being engaged I have managed 203 posts, 71 followers as of right now (I lost a few), and have driven 102 visits from Tumblr out of a total of 2181 visits to my brand new forum.

Those might look like small numbers but if you start multiplying the effort, you can see Tumblr can be a very awesome traffic source. As I said, I haven't been super active and this was more of a test. I would highly recommend a Tumblr addition to you social network portfolio. If you want to check out the forum I am working with using Tumblr you can go to my political forum.