Any advice for new tumblr accounts? I just joined and I have no clue how to grow a following? -shy anon lol

oh boy this isn't something i've really thought about before.

when i first joined tumblr in 2013 i wasn't looking to grow a following, i just knew some artists i liked were on here and i wanted to see what they were posting. it wasn't until years later i started posting my own gifs and art over on my main blog. follower counts aren't public but i don't mind sharing if it helps so on @emptymasks which i've had since 2013 and at times have posted a lot of gifs, art and fisc too and at other times have gone months and months without posting any of that because i don't see tumblr as a social media to like make money off or anything, it's just fun, i have 2988 on my main blog.

this blog dervampireprince has existed since december 2020 but it was a different blog with a different name until march 2021 when it became dervampireprince. so this blog has existed posting 18+ writing since march 2021 and audios since december 2021 and i have 3682 followers over here. never expected this blog to me my post popular but i'm not complaining.

tumblr isn't like other social medias, you can't see other users follower counts, following counts, and recommended and trending posts don't get thrown at you. you mostly only see posts from people you follow. yes there are recommended posts now but if you're an older tumblr user like myself you may use Xkit which is a 3rd party extension for tumblr that adds a bunch of features (blocking posts with certain words in them, mass tag editor/replacer, an outbox, ad blocker, use tumblr using older themes and layouts, etc) so some people don't get any recommended posts.

there's only one way to get your posts noticed by people on tumblr and that's using tags correctly, and relying on people who check their favourite tags to notice your posts. now a lot of people must not be like me, because i don't check tags for things very often, but clearly a lot of people do or my posts would have no notes. what tags you use though is going to depend on what type of post you're making. you can use up to 20 tags. tumblr will let you type more than 20, but anything above tag 20 won't be searchable, as in if you 21st tag is [marvel], your post will not show up under search results for marvel unless it's tag 20 or lower, not on tumblr general search nor in search results on your own blog.

(sidenote - tumblr's search used to take you to tumblr.com/tagged/[thing you searched for] and years ago they changed it to tumblr.com/search/[thing you searched for]. you can still get to the /tagged page by typing it in the URL bar, /tagged always shows most recent posts first which i prefer and also if you searched for [loki] then /tagged would only show you posts where the word loki is tagged, whereas /search shows you posts that have loki tagged and have the word loki typed in any text in the actual post. which is annoying and you end up with non relevant posts showing up in certain tags)

so for example if i'm writing a nsft writing posts these are the tags i tend to use are: #nsft nsftumblr #nsft concept #nsft fantasy #nsft writing #ftm nsft #mlm nsft #nblm nsft #t4t nsft #trans nsft #trans man nsft #transmasc nsft #lgbt nsft #bi nsft . Now all those tags aren't relevant to every nsft post, some are gender specific, but you can find what other tags exist by just checking the general #nsft and #nsftumblr tags and seeing what other people use as tags when they post.

(and having xkit means i don't have to remember and type these out every time, i just have them saved as a tag bundle and one click and they all go in the tags)

or for example if i'm making a post on my main blog for a sandman drawing i've down i'd use the tags: the sandman #dream of the endless #sandman #fanart #hob gadling #dreamling #dreamgadling #hob x dream #dream x hob #morpheus #lord morpheus #myart #sandman fanart #the sandman fanart . And then people find it through the fandom and ship tags mostly.

Of course if you already have followers then your followers will see your posts no matter if you use any tags or none, but tags are the only way to get people who aren't following you to see your post, and hope that some of them reblog it so their followers can see (unlike social medias like Twitter, like aren't public here, your followers can't see what posts you like, and even if you set your likes to public they can only see them if they go to a specific page on your blog, your likes don't show up in their dashboard/timeline like they do on Twitter).

This is my oldest original piece of writing on here

I had somewhere between 1-10 followers at the time and currently it stands at 52 notes. I didn't use many tags, I didn't know about the existence of many tags, but I used the few I knew about and specific kink tags and people noticed it.

And as always it's the posts you spend ages writing that get fewer notes than one silly sentence you post at 2am thinking no one will notice

Because that still sits at my post popular post on this blog. And despite this blog having much more followers than my main, my post popular post ever is a Loki themed edit I did where I just posted 9 photos from fashion editorials, recoloured them to be green and black and gold, and it got to over 15k notes within a few months and none of my posts here are close to getting that many. Follower count doesn't reflect how popular a post can get.

Basically tags are your best friend on this site, use them wisely, don't use more than 20. It doesn't hurt to follow and interact with other blogs who are posting similar content to you, your followers are going to see any posts you reblog as well as your original posts. I've never approached another blog trying to be mutuals or friends before, if I end up getting to know anyone it just sorta happens from us seeing each others names a lot in our notes and sending asks to each other. Like with with aspiring-house-husband for example, I never sent them a message saying 'can we be friends' because that's kinda creepy, I just was reblogging a lot of their writing, chose to engage by sending them some rp asks, complimenting their writing, and then i realised they'd reblogged from me, small world, and speaking of Fawn, in less than a year they got almost 7k followers which is insane and goes to show how talented at writing they are. If you're really only doing it for the followers then finding a niche can help, if you're wanting to write nsft stuff you could focus around certain kinks or creatures or something. I ended up focusing around royalty kink stuff, and I hadn't even heart of it until a couple months into making this blog so.

I hope some of that was helpful? My goal with my main tumblr was just to be able to see art other people posted, making this tumblr yes I did hope for people to reblog my writing and I liked the idea of being a nsft blog people followed, but I didn't have any plans that I would make audios and end up making income off this stuff, it just happened that by the time I wanted to make audios I was lucky that 1. people were already following me and 2. I was making them for a new fandom that was really popular at the time (Arcane).

Yeah that was long, hope it helped, I don't know what sort of content you want to make and tumblr isn't like other socials, there's no 'tumblr influencers' and you can't get sponsored or monetized posts or get payed to host ads on your blog or anything like that so I can only tell you so much.

EDIT: I remembered something else! There are some blogs called source blogs, these blogs are normally centered around a fandom, character, actor, ship, etc. For example marvelgifs is a blog that reblogs Marvel gifs. These blogs will check posts tagged with their username, not @ ing them in the post, but putting their username as one of your tags etc #marvelgifs . You can tag source blogs as a way to help get your posts potentially reblogged. Most of these blogs only post and reblog gifs and edits but some do also reblog fanart, fics and other content for example I also run a blog @europeanmusicals where I reblog and post all content about European musicals that I can find including fanart and writings, and I check the #europeanmusicals tag to see if there's posts people want me to notice to them reblog to that blog. I was able to set up that blog as I'd already been posting about European musicals on my main emptymasks blog for a year or two at that point and surrounded myself with others who like that content.