Tumblr as you are all aware is a blogging platform, but could be considered a social media platform as well. They exemplify the spirit of the Web working together by integrating another social media service’s, in this case Facebook, technologies into their own service.
That’s right, folks, it’s another Developer Spotlight from our friends at Facebook. These posts always give developers a good idea of what other applications are doing right when it comes to Facebook integration. Tumblr already has a pretty huge user base so how has Facebook impacted them?
The extent to which Tumblr interacts with Facebook is that users can share their posts on their Timelines. It does this through associating a photo, hopefully a funny one, with the post to drive user interest. Nothing better to draw attention to a Tumblr post than keyboard cat.
Tumblr posts also use the message property so that the user can add a little extra personal touch to the Timeline entry. It means that users can comment on the Tumblr post by saying, “Look at that funny cat. Cats don’t play keyboards. Oh, the hilarity of animals thinking they are humans.” This drives up user interest even more because they obviously haven’t seen tired old memes yet.
Tumblr also has great Facebook controls in place so that users can decide what they want shared on Facebook from Tumblr. If you want, you can have Facebook only share Tumblr posts or it can share all the way down to the replies that your Tumblr post receives.
Tumblr also makes use of the aggregation tool to compile all the recent Tumblr posts that were shared on your Timeline. It also counts the number of likes that you have applied to Tumblr posts to show just how obsessed you are with keyboard cat.
Tumblr recently integrated Open Graph back in April. Since then, its referral traffic from Facebook has increased by more 2.5x. While that might not seem like a lot compared to other smaller apps, Tumblr already has a huge following.
