Most people on the internet probably know what a tag (or hashtag) is and how it’s used. On Tumblr, though, tags have a very important, multi-faceted role to play in the social environment, hence why I’ve written a whole page on the topic.
Tumblr blogs are highly customisable and are a powerful tool that allows people to filter and search for the kinds of things they like to see from you. As a result, tags are most often used to organise one’s blog.
Say you’re an artist who posts a lot of their artwork on Tumblr, but also reblogs and posts all kinds of other things. It’d be helpful if people who looked at your blog could easily search and browse through your artwork without looking at all the other stuff.
Tags to the rescue! You can tag your posts with something like #artwork, and then set your blog to feature the tag so that people can easily filter your content.
From the main Tumblr interface, click the 👤Account icon on the top-right, then select Edit appearance from the menu. Scroll down a bit to get to the Featured Tags section.
Here, you can add tags like #artwork that you want users to be able to browse on your blog. You can feature up to 10 tags on your blog. Tags are unicode, so they can have spaces, accented letters, Chinese characters, emojis, etc. Go nuts.
When someone visits your blog (if they click on your profile picture or handle, tumblr.com/your-username ), they can click the 🔍Search icon which will bring up a search field, along with the list of featured tags.
You can see how powerful this can be for users browsing your blog. Tumblr can almost function like a gallery site, allowing you to organise your original work in a very neat and precise manner. Take advantage of it!
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🏷️ Featured Tumblr tags will also show up on your custom blog site (your-username.tumblr.com), but certain blog themes may not have them visible by default. Check your blog customisation options to make sure.
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Tumblr automatically generates a URL for tags on your blog. If you have an #artwork tag set up, you can use either tumblr.com/your-username/tagged/artwork or your-username.tumblr.com/tagged/artwork. This will send them to your blog with the filter already set to show posts tagged with #artwork only. This can be especially powerful when showing your Tumblr to non-Tumblr users, or for creating custom links on your blog.
You can use the mass post editor to edit tags on a lot of posts, which is explained in the relevant section of the Using Tumblr page.