Social Media and Investing – Tumblr

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February 19, 2013

Published February 19, 2013 03:21 PM

Key points

Introduction There are various resources one can use when researching investing information or investment opportunities. Social media is increasingly becoming one of those channels. We continue our series on using social media tools to discover or learn about investment opportunities, strategies or resources, by focusing on the microblogging platform and social network Tumblr. What is it? […]

Introduction
There are various resources one can use when researching investing information or investment opportunities. Social media is increasingly becoming one of those channels. We continue our series on using social media tools to discover or learn about investment opportunities, strategies or resources, by focusing on the microblogging platform and social network Tumblr.

What is it?
Founded in February 2007, Tumblr is a microblogging platform with 94.4 million blogs and 43.4 billion posts. As a microblog it has content that is generally smaller than a traditional blog both in length and file size. Tumblr can be used to broadcast various forms of media including text, images, links, chats, audio and video.

Users can also follow other users’ blogs which makes the platform a social network. While you can view posts without signing up to the platform you must be a member to follow other blogs.

The Experiment
Tumblr encourages participants to “follow the world’s creators” and is well suited to writers and artists. Nevertheless we were excited to do a search for “investing” on the platform. After all, at the time this post was written there were 84,354,543 posts published and we figured that at least some of them have to do with investing. We were not disappointed. Tumblr returned what felt like a never-ending stream of content on investing related topics which included a mix of opinions on specific stocks, educational articles, infographics and images as well as videos.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re looking through a stream on Tumblr. The first is to remember that this microblogging and social network is essentially a stream of blogs that represents a collection of opinions. The varied nature of the content on the stream is different than conventional information sources and layouts. There is no real ‘organization’ per se, it is just a flow of related content that is geared towards ‘browsing’ or ‘surfing’. Tumblr is an interesting way to consume user-driven content because you get to connect to a community around shared content interests.

The second point to consider when on Tumblr is that not all the results have to do with trading/investing. While we found many posts that were specifically about the stock market, investing and trading, there were also articles about renewable energy, real estate, startups and crowd-funding. The results you find depend on how a writer tags a post. Tagging is the process of assigning a hashtag (e.g. #trading, #investing or #money) to the topics that the writer feels are most relevant to the article and is a great way of having their post be found. Another way of optimizing posts to be found is using keywords within the post. When you search for a keyword or topic on Tumblr, all posts that have that keyword in the post or as a hashtag are served for you to read. It is also worth noting that the majority of posts are American. However, the content of many of these posts cross borders as they discuss stocks and give opinions that Canadians can use in their trading.

The final thing to keep in mind is that some of the posts are entirely promotional. Like other social media channels, savvy companies utilize their blogs and posts to reach users looking for investing information. Be aware of who the author is of any posting to get a better idea of when you’re being sold something. Below is an example of a promotional post we found on Tumblr.

Conclusion
There are many posts on investing on Tumblr. You can find opinions, learn about new companies, review another trader’s stock picks or just learn something new. You can also participate in the conversation by posting your own opinions or reposting the opinions that you want to comment on with your own two cents. We recommend taking a look through the platform to see what you can discover.

To view the investing stream go to:

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/investing

Other streams you may be interested in include:

Trading: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/trading

Stock Market: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/stock%20market

NASDAQ Tumblr page: http://nasdaq.tumblr.com/

[Note: we have found that viewing a stream when you are logged in gives different results than viewing it when you are not.]

Sources:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-demographic-breakdown-of-Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/investing

http://www.tumblr.com/about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr