hi, i’m new here and just starting my journey. as an experienced writer, what is your best advice for me? thank you.
This is a great question! And while tumblr is a little different than when I started in 2017, I think the mechanics still work about the same.
1. Post consistently! If you have the capacity to do so every day, or even multiple times per day for a solid streak of a few weeks to a month, it catches the algorithms eye that this is a content creator worth boosting.
2. Post at optimum times if you can. I’ve got a chart included below, and you can schedule posts to go out at certain times. You’ll see peak engagement by 10:00 pm EDT. Most interactions typically happen between 5:00 pm to 1:00 am EDT. Weekends are busier than weekdays.
3. Use the best hashtags to get you noticed outside of your followers! People follow tags, and it allows the chance of material tagged by that tag, such as “prose,” to land in their newsfeed. It took me a lonnnnnng time to figure tags out so I’m going to give you the distillation of my years of research.
Only the first 5-6 tags you use PUSH out to followers of that tag. The remainder (up to 20) are searchable for when people are actively searching tag content like “meteors.” If you want your poetry/writing noticed, use heavy writing tags in those first 5, but it doesn’t hurt to splash a subject in the remainder, like “loss” or “life advice” to potentially find new readers drawn to that one piece of writing.
The best writing tags I’ve found (because you can see how many followers a tag has when searching it) are: poetry, writers, writing, poets, literature, prose, quotes, art, spilled ink, spilled thoughts, spilled words, writeblr, words, poets on tumblr, writers on tumblr, etc. I actually created a database with number of followers of each tag compared to number of posts per day so that I could even have a maximized chance of being seen (but my problem lately is consistency so it doesn’t really help me).
The difference of a simple “s” on a tag can mean the difference between getting seen by thousands or millions. “Poems“ has 34 thousand followers. “Poem“ has 4 MILLION followers. 🫠
Feel free to reblog your own work to have it get seen in other time zones by your followers, but no need to hashtag your re-blogs because they don’t get “sent out to the world…” it’s strictly for search-ability within your own blog.
4. Follow and like posts from @writerscreed and @twcpoetry @smittenbypoetry and so many more fabulous writing reblog sites! (Tag reblog sites in the comments if you want to add to the list!)
5. Befriend as many other writers as you can! In the beginning it was me liking poems and following people, and even reaching out to artists to tell them how much I loved their work that sparked some of my greatest friendships on here and allowed for collaboration and to be shared further. The writing community is SO fabulous here! And I am always happy to be a resource with any questions that you have!
Rooting for you!
Mo
