Brands

Starting A Company Blog: Tumblr or WordPress?

By Reb Carlson

Tumblr or WordPress? WordPress or Tumblr. If you’re starting a blog, you’re likely considering one of these free leading options. But which is best for you?

Deciding on which platform to use depends on your strategy. Tumblr offers a clean feel and a built-in community of passionate users; WordPress, on the other hand, offers more customization and a robust platform. If you’re torn between these two systems, consider the following facets:

Set Up

Tumblr provides hundreds of themes to choose from and if you know a little HTML, you can customize by adding links, changing colors and fonts — but that’s it.

WordPress allows more creative freedom and utilization, but because there is so much potential, one could get frustrated if they can’t recreate what they have envisioned. If you are a first time user, you need to invest in learning the necessary plug-ins and coding tricks, though Wordpress has a robust plug-in community to teach you.

Advantage: Tumblr for ease, WordPress for customization.

Readership Engagement

Tumblr reader engagement is usually in the form of link sharing, re-blogging, “liking” and the occasional note. On Tumblr your aim is to get people to re-blog your posts, which will expose your content to a wider net of people. A successful Tumblr blog requires curating as well as creating so be sure to re-blog as well.

When using Wordpress, you have to put in more effort to increase your readership. If you do solicit comments on your
blog, WordPress lends itself to longer site visits and dedicated readers who will write more thoughtful comments.

Advantage: Tumblr for built-in community

Template

Your company blog should be a way to direct people to whatever is the core of your business — if you go with a Tumblr, you need to have an additional company site to host your company info on. What might look like an additional page on Tumblr is most likely a link directing to another site. On Tumblr, someone is most likely to discover your blog becausev someone else re-blogged your content.
Your success on WordPress is based on how searchable your content is. WordPress allows you to select and build upon a template to create multiple pages and also build your company site all in one. Being able to use categories as well keeps your posts organized for readers.

Advantage: WordPress

The decision between using WordPress and Tumblr is based on your content strategy, who your target audience is and how much you can invest. Tumblr requires ongoing involvement in the community, and the maintenance of WordPress can be time consuming.