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Newsweek on Tumblr: Good Effort, Needs More Engagement

January 6, 2010 by Adam Sherk

Awareness of Newsweek’s Tumblr site has been increasing of late. It’s actually been around for a while but Newsweek seems to have been giving it more attention over the past few months.

Newsweek Tumblr

I like it. The layout is clean and simple, the content is interesting and Newsweek is mixing in plenty of items from other sources. That’s critical for giving the site stand-alone value as opposed to just being a feeder site to Newsweek.com.

In looking through the site though one thing stands out: nearly every item has no comments or reactions:

Newsweek Tumblr user comments

That seems odd but it’s not just a holiday season slowdown. I went back several months and it’s not easy to find items that have gotten comments. I don’t have any data on what kind of traffic the Tumblr site is getting but either it is fairly low or visitors simply aren’t starting discussions there.

To investigate further I did a quick check for Twitter activity. I didn’t find any shared newsweek.tumblr.com URLs through Bit.ly search and TweetMeme isn’t registering any recent activity:

Newsweek Tumblr on TweetMeme

A search right from Twitter doesn’t bring up much but there are some nice comments about the site itself:

Newsweek Tumblr - Twitter real-time results

So based on just this quick look it doesn’t seem like Newsweek is getting a lot of engagement with its Tumblr site yet. Some visitors are likely clicking through to the full articles on Newsweek.com and then commenting there and/or sharing the newsweek.com URLs which is also a good thing. But it would be nice to see the Tumblr site have a more interactive feel.

In terms of search engine visibility, as of today the Tumblr site is #9 in my Google results for “Newsweek” so it’s working its way up. Looks like they need to adjust the META description tag on their home page though:

Newsweek Tumblr Google snippet

UPDATE:
FishbowlNY did a good interview with Mark Coatney, the editor who is responsible for Newsweek’s Tumblr.

Related posts:

  1. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards
  2. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on The Fox News Facebook Page
  3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get The Most Engagement?
  4. Is Using Facebook Comments Good for Publishers?
  5. Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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