Mozilla’s Webmaker Tumblr

The Webmaker Tumblr channel saw the fastest early growth of all our channels – from 0 to 190,000 in just under one year – primarily due to savvy placements on the Tumblr Radar, consistent content themes advocating ‘making as learning’ and offering direct on-ramps to Webmaker tools and projects for users to experiment with.

Our original primary audience were ‘people learning to code, and make things online’ so our content focused on cool learn-as-you-make projects to try and share as well as events promotions for people who were seeking inspiration, tools, community and mentorship in the new ‘Maker Movement’.

Later we pivoted this channel to capture a more general audience with an ‘I love the Web’ campaign, and celebrated global ‘Maker’ events and partner initiatives, including the Mozilla Festival and Make Things Do Stuff campaigns.

Strategy:

• create a fun and compelling feed for Makers to explore and share cool digital literacy content with their friends
• share the Webmaker.org mission, product and activities with compelling ‘get your hands dirty’ CTAs
• profiling community evangelists, their work, and promoting and reporting out on community events
• building clear on-ramps to Webmaker.org tools
• establish regular metrics tracking and review using Union Metrics and Google Analytics
• report bugs to development team to improve project performance on channels

Results:

• Gained over 137,000 new followers in 2013
  
• Grew Curator audience by 1947 likers and rebloggers
• Generated 2938 notes from 260 original content items