How To Create Flipboard Magazine

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Content marketers have a task of creating and distributing valuable and relative content to the right prospect and at the right time. The objective is driving profitable consumer action by attracting, acquiring, and engaging a clearly defined target audience.

To stay ahead in the content marketing industry, it is important, as marketers, to keep up with industry trends so that your company remains competitive. Arguably, one of these trends is social media.

The social, mobile web has digitized information and allowed us all to connect with anyone, anywhere. When we need information, we can find it instantly.

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Flipboard is a social magazine and it is basically a way to look at all the things that your friends are sharing with you across all the different social networks that you use: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and Tumblr. Flipboard magazines are beautiful and it allows you to curate and share your favorite articles, photos, videos and audio tracks.

The content is organized in a way that is easy for users to read by using beautiful typography, photography, and pagination. This gives a sense of pacing and flowing rhythm through timelines and stories.

Flipboard is essentially a social media browser. You can jump from feed to feed and everything is organized in a social structure. Flipboard connects to your social networks and gathers all the good stuff your friends are sharing, or you can sign up for a professional magazine and get stuff for free!

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This is really what Flipboard is all about. Before starting to create Flipboard magazines, let's understand the basics about how Flipboard works.

You can download the Flipboard app for free at the App Store, Google Play, Window Store, and Amazon App Store. After launching the application for the first time, you will be prompted to pick a few topics anywhere from Politics and News to Sports and Science. Once you pick a few topics, your Flipboard is built and you can instantly start flipping through the pages you care about.

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You can search for great content by tapping the popular red ribbon on top right corner. Now, when you search or browse for something on Flipboard that you'd like to organize into a magazine, click the plus sign in the lower right corner. You can put this content in one of your previously created magazines or create a new magazine and give it a title.

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Flipboard also has a Chrome plug-in that lets you collect items from the web straight into a magazine. The most recent item you flip will become the cover of your magazine. You can go into a different article and promote it as your cover but you can always reset your cover by tapping on 'Edit' and then 'Reset Cover' and that reverts it to the latest item you flipped.

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Magazines can be either private or public, and you can create magazines for anything. Also, if you tap and hold an article, you have more options to share via email, SMS, and social media.

There are so many possibilities and reasons why you might want to create a magazine. You might just want to save articles to read later or maybe you are really passionate about something and you want to share your expertise with the world. I know I can always find something on Flip Tech, for instance, and my Flipboard updates when my friends do, so I'm never at a loss for something to look at.

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Since Flipboard is so heavily social, you can actually leave a comment or like it on Facebook. In fact, whenever someone likes, comments on or subscribes to a magazine, you'll get an alert in your notifications.

If you give a Flip about company growth, read up.

A social thunderstorm is brewing. Serious online marketers know that in order to harness the power of social media you need to incorporate the latest innovative marketing tools in your content strategy. Flipboard emerges as the latest content aggregator tool, which leverages the power of content and social media to help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way.

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From a brand perspective, by creating magazines on Flipboard, publishers can extend their brand beyond their websites. Brands can flip their products or services into a magazine to create a catalogue, and Flipboard magazines bring this all together in a beautiful customized visual presentation.

Over the past few months more than 60 recognizable brands have launched curated magazines. This includes Callaway Golf, Levi's and more.

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Let's assume you have 500 readers on your magazine. This means that at least half of your readers will potentially share your content unto their magazine, and their own readers might do the same… catch my drift? Utilize Flipboard as a content marketing channel in which the content you curate can be strategically gathered to support your branding efforts.

Pareto principle

So, you know that you can build your brand by populating your Flipboard magazine. If you are a restaurant owner and flip recipes into your Flipboard magazine it becomes a cookbook; music turns into a soundtrack and photos become a portfolio.

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However, users are less likely to subscribe to a Flipboard that is only dedicated to one brand or message. It's important, therefore, to have a healthy mix of your own brand promotion and related content your customers would want to read and experience.

Ideally, 80 percent of your content is flipped across the web while 20 percent is allotted to brand and promotion.

Since your primary objective is to provide your readers with the relevant information, mix up and balance your content between your own blog and other sites. Flipboard is awesome at doing this and it is one of the must have apps. When you combine the iPad with social media, and from a technological standpoint HTML5, and you bring those things together you have a recipe for amazing innovation and visually appealing content.

Flipboard, with the rise of mobile devices, is an established player in the news aggregation field which is changing . . . rapidly. The company describes its mission as "a quest to transform how people discover, view and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media". Flipboard isn't a blogging platform. It is something entirely different; it is an experience. It's a way of curating content around your brand to provide added value beyond the usual with beautiful layouts because design matters . . . and Flipboard knows that.

Check out our magazine "Marketing for Startups" at http://flip.it/UGv6P

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