In my last post, I shared the story of how I found and fell in love with Flipboard. I hope it inspired some of you to download the app and get flipping for yourself. And now that you’ve seen firsthand just how addicting and informative the platform can be, I’m going to share my top six reasons why you, and your firm, should make Flipboard a part of your social media and branding strategy.
BENEFITS FOR YOU
Personal branding
I’ve touched on this briefly already, but Flipboard provides an amazing opportunity to craft and support your personal brand. Through the curation of quality content, you can use your Flipboard profile, activity, and magazines to position yourself as an expert on the subjects that interest you. Through the act of curation, you’re also reading constantly about these subjects, educating yourself, and becoming a subject matter expert worth following.
Content libraries
Have you ever been in a meeting or working with someone on a project and said, “I read an article about this once”? Of course you have. And how often are you able to actually locate that article quickly and while it’s still relevant to the conversation? With Flipboard, you’ll never have that problem again. By saving articles of interest to relevant magazines, you’re able to store your favorite and most impactful content for future, and easy, reference. This is also great for saving content that you want to share later on another social platform, like Twitter.
Expanded reach
You’re already sharing relevant content with your audience on Twitter. Why not take one extra little step and flip that content into a magazine? Flipboard has even created a bookmarklet you can install in your browser to make this easy to do from a desktop environment. Now all that content you work so hard to find has a permenant home instead of vanishing into the Twitter-verse. Plus, you get the added bonus of reaching an additional audience without any additional work.
BENEFITS FOR YOUR FIRM
Brand recognition
Flipboard boasts over 100 million users and 50+ million active monthly readers. That’s one hell of an audience. It doesn’t hurt that this audience is also well-educated, affluent, and extremely tech savvy. In other words, they are decision makers or will be soon. By integrating Flipboard into your firm’s social media strategy, you can become a trusted source of quality content in a platform your target audience is already using. Through the strategic creation of magazines using relevant and engaging content, you’ll also be exposing a whole new group of subscribers, and potential clients, to your brand and what you’re all about. You can even embed your Flipboard magazines brochure-style across your firm’s website to share content with visitors from outside the app.
Promote original content
The content on Flipboard comes from a variety of online sources, and there’s no reason why your original blog content couldn’t be flipped into the platform. All it takes is for one person to flip your blog into one of their magazines and share it with their audience. Why wait? You can be that person. By creating strategic content that fits within the themes of your corporate magazines, you can weave your original content with the other news and articles you’re sharing, effectively soft selling your firm’s expertise to an expanded audience through your Flipboard magazines. And if you’re lucky, or creating great content of course, someone will flip it into their own magazine, and so on, and so on.
Employee engagement in social media
One of the greatest features of a Flipboard magazine is its ability to support multiple contributors. That’s right, you can invite your technical staff to contribute directly to their service or market’s magazine. Now you may prefer to have a little more control than that, especially at the beginning. That’s why I’ve created a private magazine on our corporate account where employees who want to participate can flip content. Then, as the account curator, I’m able to review that content and flip it directly into the corresponding public-facing magazines. It not only gives technical staff a tangible and easy way to contribute to your firm’s social media activity, but it also educates you on your firm’s markets and what leadership views as relevant to their clients. It doesn’t hurt that your staff then get to take advantage of the personal benefits of Flilpboard as well.
Bonus ideas
In addition to these six reasons, here are a few more ideas for Flipboard that I couldn’t fit in above but didn’t want to leave out.
- Create project-specific magazines that curate all the news coverage of a single project over the course of its development with the magazine embedded on your website’s project page.
- Have a high-profile expert on your team? Create a magazine all about them, including articles they’ve written or been featured in, coverage of their projects, and any press releases they’re mentioned in. Use it as a supplement to their resume and embed it on their profile on your website.
- Flip all your earned news coverage, blogs, or whatever you want to track into a magazine to save as a part of your personal portfolio.
- Use private magazines to save research on your clients and competitors.
- Create a recruiting magazine, flip job postings into it, and embed it on your careers page. You could even include other relevant original or repurposed content that reflects your corporate culture and values.
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