Follow the golden rule of social media — tailor content to the platform where it will appear. Tumblr is not WordPress or Blogger. It’s not Twitter and it’s not a Facebook status update. Simply put, Tumblr is best used as a platform to share media.

Flickr/cHopan

Here are three tips and examples of what content works on Tumblr:

• Video clips that make you want to hit replay

Sometimes I’ll scroll through my RSS reader and see a new post from a favorite blog that hasn’t been updated in a while. But there’s almost nothing more disappointing in RSS land than discovering that the new post is a video the blogger came across and simply had to share (read: not original). Yeah, maybe I find the video funny  or interesting, but on a blog I expect to hear the blogger’s voice. On Tumblr, I expect to find videos that I feel compelled to share with others.

• Images that scream, “Have you seen this?”

Tumblr is a flexible and visually-oriented platform. It really lends itself to stories that are told through images rather than words (think infographics, photo journalism etc.). I learned this first-hand when I stumbled upon a picture of trees wrapped in spiderwebs in Pakistan. I’d never seen anything like it and found it fascinating that it was actually helping with malaria control in the area (my Tumblr deals with global health and foreign news mostly). I posted it and so far, 50 people couldn’t believe their eyes either.

There are also several categories on Tumblr’s Explore page that are focused on images: GIF, Tattoos, Illustration and Art.

• Under-covered stories

Tumblr is becoming increasingly popular in the journalism world. There’s a lot of smart curation happening, especially with stories that don’t traditionally get massive attention from mainstream sources.In an interview I did for Mediaite, Ernie Smith of Short Form Blog talked about how the community helped shed light on the story of Jennifer Ruxford, who experienced health issues because of the Gulf oil spill.

“I think that’s where sites like Tumblr can get a real advantage on news stories. We can find opportunities like this to tell others about things that are getting underplayed in the press, and by telling people about them, can make people in our circle care, Smith said.

As for things that certainly don’t work, there really aren’t hard-and-fast rules. For the most part, I’d caution against text-heavy posts, but there are exceptions, such as this humorous piece about New York Times headlines (310 notes and counting) and some posts that appear under the popular long reads tag.

The site has two main goals: 1. to help people enhance their worldview or perspective of global events; 2. to increase dialogue about international news and make the world smaller through conversation and interaction, both on this site and on Twitter.

The philosophy behind the site is “hyperlocal gone global.” There is an emphasis on what is happening in a specific place at a specific time and looks at how people are reacting to that event(s) in the area.

Barbara Iverson recently wrote about the site–which launched at the beginning of this year–for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits:

[Breaking Tweets] is associated with the account Twitter.com/breakingtweets, but it takes Twitter messages to a new level. The site has just added Breaking Tweets Entertainment and Breaking Tweets Sports, and will soon add Breaking Tweets Chicago…

Breaking Tweets has human editors who manually select messages for inclusion in their stories. Furthermore, the editors treat the Tweets like quotes, weaving the 140 character missives into a comprehensive story on a news topic.From a “virtual newsroom,” the team keeps connected via e-mail and online.

Last month, BeatBlogging.org’s Lily Q interviewed BreakingTweets.com founder Craig Kanalley, a journalism grad student at DePaul University (the staff listed on the Breaking Tweet’s site mostly consists of journalism students).

Kanalley tells Lily that he first got the idea for the site after he “saw the amount of people twittering about Election Day and how Twitter can serve as a place for breaking news, very personal feelings and eyewitness accounts.”

A few more snippets from Kanalley:

Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, they are just like quotes that journalists would often use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.

Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.

See the full interview here.

Don’t let the name fool you though, Breaking Tweets is not intended to “break the news.” In a blog post, Kanalley writes, “The point of the site I put together is to chronicle the biggest news around the world each day and put a Twitter spin on it by personalizing the news through tweets.”

But the site actually did scoop the BBC and CNN last week.  Read more about that here.

Breaking Tweets logo/BreakingTweets.com