OK, so that headline may seem a little baited, but it’s an accurate number, bear with me 🙂

Having written previously how Flipboard magically makes Twitter readable with lists and Flipboard’s ability to simplify your digital consumption I thought it would be useful to bloggers and marketers alike to highlight the power of curating Magazines within the Flipboard platform, along with my own experience of curating magazines.

This tweet from @Documentally sets the scene perfectly.


I would confidently guess you could find every topic in that magazine stand on Flipboard, have it delivered to your mobile device daily, updated with handpicked content from passionate, informed curators. All this at zero cost (what does a magazine cost these days £5/$10?), plus the effort to recycle all those dusty back copies of your favourite magazines, this of course 6 months after you stacked them next to your sofa as keepsakes.

Flipboard Magazines

Installed on over 300m mobile devices Flipboard now has over 70m active users (July 2015). Flipboard Magazines were introduced to the platform in March 2013. 26.5 Million magazines later (March 2016), magazines are thriving with quality, relevance, variety and expertise, not to mention the visual presentation and story telling the platform is renowned for.

Furthermore, as news consumption on social media and apps potentially plateau Flipboard is bucking the trend. See graph below.

Top Apps in News Category Graph

 

This doesn’t surprise me, Flipboard just works, shutting out the noise, tailored sources, delivering content on topics and people you care about via a sleek and visually appealing interface. I’d also suggest user retention has been enhanced by the non-intrusive deployment of advertising, choosing a more selective, classier approach to monetisation.

The Curators

Individuals, Teams, Professionals, Bloggers, Educators, Marketers, Creatives, anyone with a passion, cause or story to tell can be a curator. The scale and attention within the platform also naturally attracts publishers, CNN, NY Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Time Magazine, TechCrunch, Sony, Levi, GQ Magazine, Starbucks, Land Rover and Rolex, just to name a few.

21,236 Reasons

I started curating on Flipboard few months after the feature was launched, at the time, as a parent to be I was consuming all the baby and parent related articles, sourced via a Twitter list within Flipboard, this was fine but I needed to be able to reference and share the most valuable and useful items with my partner.

A Flipboard magazine was ideal for this, allowing me to simply Flip an article into it that we could read later, BabyBrains the magazine was born. As all parents will vouch for, the learnings don’t end at birth so the Flipping continued.

Unexpectedly the magazine gained some momentum and today, 9000 articles later, has 21,236 followers with over 3.3m page flips, a reasonable and consistent source of referral traffic for the content featured. This has also extended to a 6,000+ following on Facebook. I later curated other topics of interest, Best of Digital, Aquisition.Digital and Liverpool FC Magazine, it’s become an enjoyable and natural habit, whilst keeping me well informed on topics I’m passionate about.

The Opportunity

As you can see from my own experience above, curating on Flipboard provides a great opportunity for bloggers, marketers, and individuals to discover content and share their own with a new audience on a platform that has reach, style, accessibility, and attention.

Don’t forget, Flipboard magazines are also great to present group projects, newsletters, events, photo albums, product catalogues, educational courses and much more, with the choice to display them public or private.

Getting Started

  1. Complete your Flipboard profile, Jessica Rosenberg does a good job of walking you through this in this article.
  2. Consolidate all of your news sources and social networks into Flipboard as seen here
  3. Search and follow related topics and magazines from other curators, suggestions based on your interests will also pop up.
  4. Follow individual profiles who are curating similar or related magazines, curating their content also allows your magazines to be discovered.
  5. Chrome user? Add the Flipboard extension to your browser window, this makes it super easy to Flip content into your magazines as you discover it.
  6. Blog or Company News page? announce the magazine and embed it into your page.
  7. Share your magazine URL on social platforms on a regular basis.
  8. If you are on Twitter follow these accounts @Flipboard, @FlipboardMag, @FlipboardCS, @FlipboardClub, I have also created a Flipboard community list which you are welcome to follow.
  9. Curation, quality over quantity, readers love consistency, don’t disappoint them. Change Magazine covers weekly, images matter, make them appealing, not too white/bright as to hide the text. Overall, regular, relevant and readable wins.
  10. Follow the Flipboard resource magazines below.

Join the Flipboard Community

Participate in the Flipboard community, the quickest way to do this is to join the Facebook group “FlipboardChat“, the group created by Aida Boucheron, the group now has over 600 friendly members who discuss everything Flipboard related. They also host #FlipboardChat on Twitter every Wednesday AND #FlipboardFriday where group members are encouraged to share their favourite or their own magazines. Also look out for #MagMakers and #FlipBlogger from Flipboard.

Are you already curating magazines on Flipboard? are you planning to? would love to hear if this article helped in any way, happy to answer questions in the comments below.

I am not affiliated with Flipboard nor is this a paid or guest post. My posts are not commercially influenced, and all opinions are my own.

Tags: , ,