Tumblr Goes Long Form With New ‘Bloggy’ Update

It seems that longer form content is all the rage these days in social media. As less people make the choice to set-up their own websites and blogs, products like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse give folks the tools to create (and a pre-built audience for viewing). Today, Tumblr is taking a stroll down this very path with a major update to posts.

Instead of posts looking more like a Pinterest Pin, Tumblr posts will now look like an actual blog post with the ability to intermingle media and text. The posting experience will also be upgraded as users will operating an a WYSIWYG format and their work will be displayed live just as it looks in the editor. Highlighting text will allow for  quick formatting including linking, adding lists or manipulating text:

This will not only match up Tumblr as a suitable opponent to Medium, and will also help the battle against WordPress. The complaint that folks faced when using a Tumblr blog as their main outlet is the limitations that it (traditionally) came with. With the new changes rolling out, brands may opt to take a look at leveraging Tumblr as their blog software and tap into the growing userbase.

For more information on this change, see the official Tumblr post.