Social data intelligence firm Pulsar found in a recent study that the social TV activity of Tumblr, the blogging platform owned by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), outperformed Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR). The study was commissioned by Tumblr.
The UK-based social data intelligence firm studied data regarding Tumblr and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) obtained through Datasift and social activities on four episodes of shows aired during the fall and winter of 2013. The shows include Sherlock, Supernatural, Pretty Little Liars and Sleepy Hollow. Pulsar also monitored social activities of Malcolm in the Middle for 11 days last December.
Findings in the Tumblr study
The social intelligence firm found that 70% of the social mentions on the shows mentioned above occurred on Tumblr during the 11-day period of the study. The remaining 30% of social mentions happened on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR).
Pulsar found that social mentions on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) regarding the shows including re-tweets were high when the shows were broadcasted live, but it declined faster to 3% after 12 hours. On the other hand, social mentions on Tumblr declined gradually from its peak including re-blogs and sustained momentum for days with 43% chatter level aftrr 12 hours of the broadcast.
In terms of unique authors, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) still surpassed Tumblr with $1.5 million compared with its rival’s 1.4 million.
Diving deeper into characters
Lee Brown, global head of brand partnerships at Tumblr explained that people are visiting the company’s site not just to check something. According to him, “[People aren’t] coming just to check in. They’re coming to dive deeper into the characters, create their own storylines, put text over static images — to create content with a much longer shelf life.”
On the other hand, Shankar Gupta, vice president of strategy at 360i opined that some of the TV-related contents posted by Tumblr’s hard-core fans have real staying power, and GIFs that show a few seconds of a show serve as an effective summary for a certain episode. “They serve to provide an area of common experience that people rally around,” said Gupta. He also noted that the staying power of tweets were brief because its nature is rooted in real time.
Meanwhile Rich Guest, president of U.S operations of Tribal Worldwide commented, “For me, Tumblr sits in this place of really interesting emerging platforms for brands, like Snapchat, which no one’s really figured out a way to use regularly.” According to him, Tumblr is a platform where passionate TV fans gather.
