10 reasons why Posterous is better than Tumblr
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EDIT – April 2011: I wrote this post 2 years ago. Things move fast in the social media world and I recently wrote this post in favour of Tumblr, which might give you more insight as to which platform to choose. Thanks for reading 
I am a late adopter when it comes to light-blogging service Posterous, purely because I’ve been a Tumblr user for quite a while.
After reading that Posterous has finally decided to introduce customizable themes, I decided to give the service a go.
If you still unsure as to which light-blogging service is for you, you’ll hopefully find this blog post helpful. Here are 10 reasons why I think Posterous is better than Tumblr:
1) You can easily import your Tumblr posts on your shiny new Posterous so you won’t lose any of your content
2) You can configure Posterous to automatically ping multiple services when updating your Posterous (Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc)
3) Posterous automatically uploads your new posts onto your old Tumblr, a win-win option as you can always go back to your old Tumblr should you wish to
4) You can monitor how many times a post has been viewed in your side-bar widget, and how many people have favourited that post
5) You can also easily install Google Analytics and Feedburner onto your Posterous, something which I couldn’t do with my previous Tumblelog
6) Your tags are visible in your Posterous’ side bar, making your content easily searchable (again I couldn’t do that with my old Tumblr)
7) Once you’ve tagged your posts, Posterous will automatically recommend other users you should follow – blogging is all about forging online relationships, right?
8 ) You can click on a user’s avatar to find out more about them – again I found Tumblr a little anonymous
9) The bookmarklet is dead-easy to install and use
10) Posterous are listening to their community and fast introducing new features
Are you sold yet? Do you prefer Tumblr or Posterous? Let me know in the comments
| Print article | This entry was posted by Lolly on 18/09/2009 at 3:01 pm, and is filed under Blogging. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 2 years ago
At last! I've been using Tumblr for a while, but noticed that more and more people prefer Posterous. Tumblr is still great for quick, casual posts, but lacks the fucntionality some seasoned bloggers got used to and demand nowadays even from microblogging tools like Tumblr. So are you moving to Posterous now?
about 2 years ago
I'll be moving to Posterous until further notice. The great thing about it, it that you can add the Tumblr service when you sign up which automatically pings your old Tumblr so the content on both blogs is always sunchronised.
It's a pretty clever way of getting Tumblr users to trial Posterous
about 2 years ago
“5) You can also easily install Google Analytics and Feedburner onto your Posterous, something which I couldn’t do with my previous Tumblelog”
I use Google Analytics with my current Tumblr and have had no problems with it. Anytime I change my tumblr theme I just re-copy the code into the theme.
“6) Your tags are visible in your Posterous’ side bar, making your content easily searchable (again I couldn’t do that with my old Tumblr) “
Your tags can be viewable in Tumblr it just depends on which Tumblr theme you use.
I've fallen in love with the small community of followers and the people I follow at Tumbr so I don't see myself switching but I do like the fact that Posterous automatically posts your old tumblogs onto it's site and will re-post Posterous posts onto Tumblr. I might poke around with Posterous and see what it's about but I doubt I'll leave Tumblr, haha.
about 2 years ago
You're lucky because none of these worked with my template… but again I picked the really funky one!
The other important factor for me as well is that a lot of bloggers I follow who also blog on WordPress/Blogger are also on on Posterous.
Posterous all the way for me I am afraid
about 2 years ago
No need to be afraid of that, haha.
I see that they just came out with themes over there. That's a reason for me to check it out 'cause I was not feeling the lack of customization before.
about 2 years ago
I have Tumblerd and not Posteroused, but have now changed to Clogging, or clipmarkblogging…check my blog:-)
about 2 years ago
Wonderful find!
Thanks a lot!
Have now imported a Tumblr account into a posterous account and hoping I can find a way to export same into a self hosted WordPress Blog (http://www.chairblog.eu) see the page http://www.chairblog.eu/chair-blog-tumblr/
about 2 years ago
I have to say I was quite disappointed with my experience using Tumblr; it looks great, but for someone new to blogging I found it incredibly frustrating to use, or even find any blogs to follow! The most popular users all seem to post photos and nothing else. I'm now using wordpress and it has been a joy to use so far.
Still not sure where I stand on 'light blogging', but posterous actually looks pretty good from having a quick glance at your profile – that's the sort of thing I had in mind when I joined Tumblr. Maybe I'll transfer it over.
about 2 years ago
I'm using Posterous to post to Tumblr, so people can connect with me on whichever platform they prefer.
about 2 years ago
I'm using Posterous to post to Tumblr, so people can connect with me on whichever platform they prefer.
about 1 year ago
Exactly my opinions too one why posterous is way better. Great review.
about 1 year ago
I’ve actually just started up a Posterous because of this… at the same time, I think most of your arguments aren’t really that strong (or, at least, aren’t really relevant to me).
1) You can easily import your Tumblr posts on your shiny new Posterous so you won’t lose any of your content
. If I wasn’t going to use Posterous, that wouldn’t be a reason to switch over.
-> that’s helpful, but not why Posterous is better
2) You can configure Posterous to automatically ping multiple services when updating your Posterous (Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc)
You can do that with Tumblr too – my feed autoposts to my Facebook and Twitter.
3) Posterous automatically uploads your new posts onto your old Tumblr, a win-win option as you can always go back to your old Tumblr should you wish to.
Again, not a reason to switch, just a nice-to-have if you do (although, to be fair, it is *very* nice to have, so you don’t lose followers you had before the switch).
4) You can monitor how many times a post has been viewed in your side-bar widget, and how many people have favourited that post
This is certainly better than vanilla Tumblr, but once you start using Google Analytics, you get so much more information that it’s not really necessary.
5) You can also easily install Google Analytics and Feedburner onto your Posterous, something which I couldn’t do with my previous Tumblelog
Well… It’s certainly possible, and depending on how much you can fiddle with code, it’s relatively simple.
6) Your tags are visible in your Posterous’ side bar, making your content easily searchable (again I couldn’t do that with my old Tumblr)
Again, this is to do with the theme. Even if your theme doesn’t display tags by default, you can enable it by editing the code (obviously not so great if you have no knowledge of HTML, but still doable with online tutorials).
7) Once you’ve tagged your posts, Posterous will automatically recommend other users you should follow – blogging is all about forging online relationships, right?
That’s pretty cool. I haven’t experienced it yet, but it does sound good. No direct correlation to Tumblr, except to follow a few people who sound interesting, and see who they’re reblogging, follow them etc.
8 ) You can click on a user’s avatar to find out more about them – again I found Tumblr a little anonymous
Yeah, Tumblr has a tendency for that, but given that the Posterous information is put there by the poster, you could easily put more information about yourself on Tumblr if you wanted to. I guess it’s a different kind of community – some want to remain anonymous, others want to be better known?
9) The bookmarklet is dead-easy to install and use
. Haven’t tried the Posterous one, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s much of a muchness.
As is the tumblr bookmarklet I’m using
10) Posterous are listening to their community and fast introducing new features
I don’t know too much about that, given that I’ve only just started. Tumblr doesn’t seem to have introduced a whole lot of functionality recently, but I haven’t really seen anything that’s necessary to implement, or anything people are asking for, so..
In conclusion, while I’ve liked what I’ve seen about Posterous, I don’t think you should necessarily switch from Tumblr to Posterous.
In fact, to start off, I think Tumblr is better – and at a later date, a switch to Posterous because it’s so easy to import all of the posts. Tumblr feels more intuitive for me and, while the email post thing is pretty simple, I like a more WYSIWYG interface for posting, for which Tumblr works pretty well.
That said, thanks for the post!
about 1 year ago
posterous is way better than tumblr, functionality wise and also you can IMPORT from your old blog, i couldn’t import my 800 post photoblog at squarespace to anywhere else, even tho the import was a bit screwed up.. plus tumblr is an annoying kiddie popularity contest, brings back bad schoolyard experiences lol
about 8 months ago
Posterous is actually weaker for SEO reasons. It does not utilize meta description tags and the help sections make no reference to optimizing your themes to address this. This effects all kinds of stuff most notably proper facebook sharing.