This is the fourth installment in our Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Flipboard Pro. Just like other social media, Flipboard can be a huge time suck, or you can use it to your advantage.
In this post we’ll look at some creative ways of using Flipbboard and making it work for you.
Flipboard is a great, if yet not very well known way to promote your stuff for example (and by stuff I mean your blog, your book, your products, your cause, your whatever). It’s already gaining momentum and while it’s nowhere near as well known as Pinterest for driving traffic to a blog for instance, it certainly does have the potential. But just like with other social media, the social part has to stay front and center.
So how can you use Flipboard to your advantage?
Here are 9 creative ideas:
1. Make Your Own Website Flipboard Friendly
First of all, your own site has to be Flipboard friendly, which also happens to be Pinterest friendly and share friendly in general. First of all, make sure your site is mobile friendly so that people can easily see it on their mobile devices.
But for Flipboard pictures are also important. Posts without interesting pictures won’t be chosen as easily to be flipped into a magazine because just text isn’t that attractive to look at. If you want other people to share your content, make sure it’s attractive.
2. Create Magazines in Your Niche
The most obvious way to use Flipboard is by creating (curating) magazines around your niche. It’s no problem to use a few of your own posts every now and then, provided you also add plenty of other interesting stuff.
Be sure to stay on topic and be consistent in offering great content in your magazines, thus attracting loyal subscribers. That way you will be able to offer real added value to your subscribers by selecting the best reading materials in their area of interest, while subtly bringing your own content to their attention as well.
3. Use Interesting Tweets in Your Magazines
Quotes always work well on Twitter, but they work well on Flipboard as well. Spice up your magazines with great quotes from others or from yourself to make people think.
The easiest way to do this is by favoriting the tweets you want to use, these will show up in your ‘favorites’ on your Flipboard Twitter account. From there, a simple tap will add them to your magazine. While the magazine shot below could have benefitted from a picture, the tweet does actually stand out and add some spice.
Using tweets with links isn’t really practical, these will link back to the Twitter site meaning two clicks for people to actually read what you’ve linked to. Too cumbersome.
4. Use Pictures, Videos and Memes
A whole lotta text won’t keep people’s attention, but a mix of various visual elements might do the trick. Be sure to not just flip articles, but also pictures, videos and memes. It will make for a nice visual break, provide some encouragement or a quick laugh and keep your readers interested flipping through your magazine.
And if you’re smart, you can even throw in some extra publicity for your events. Below is a magazine that is not only visually attractive because of the large picture on the left, but also cleverly added an Instagram invite for one of their events on the right. The options are endless.
5. Use Music
To be honest, I haven’t tried this yet, but Flipboard claims you can even use music in your magazines. Just flip songs from Soundcloud to add a soundtrack to your magazine.
6. Follow a Limited Number of Tweeps
If you’re not really into Twitter, but still want to keep track of what certain people tweet, Flipboard is a great way. Just create a Twitter list of these people, which will show up if you connect your Twitter to Flipboard, as we discussed in a previous post.
The tweets from these people will now show up, meaning you can follow them easily without them getting lost in the avalanche of tweets during the day.
7. Create a Magazine Around a #Hashtag
If you are attending or organizing a conference, why not create a magazine from the tweets people tweet about it, using your conference’s hashtag. It’s a great way of making a Twitter stream visual and accessible.
8. Create a Magazine Around Your Best Work
Another option is to create a magazine using your own best work from various sources. I blog for various blogs for instance, besides my own blog. If I wanted to highlight my own work, or create a digital portfolio, I could easily flip all my best posts into a magazine. It would be a great and innovative way to show my work to editors for instance.
9. Use Flipboard for Projects
I’m in youth ministry and while I haven’t used it yet, no doubt Flipboard would be a great tool to use with my students. How about I let them create a magazine of their own on an assigned topic, for instance body image in the media? I’m sure they’d have a field day and come up with something really interesting.
Have you found more or different creative ways to use Flipboard? Please share in the comments!
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