How We Used Flipboard to Reach a Wider Audience (Hey, This Really Worked!)
For those of you who might not know, Flipboard is a magazine app used by millions of people every day to discover and share stories. Working with world-class publishers around the world (think Apple, TIME, Fortune The New York Times), Flipboard helps content creators reach new readers who are passionate and engaged in the topics they cover. Flipboard magazines are presented beautiful in magazine format, allowing users to “flip” through articles, images and videos being shared to a potential audience of over 145 million people on their mobile devices and desktops. Since it premiered in 2010, it’s become one of the most popular news apps in the world.
Flipboard recently opened up its platform to enable anyone to become a Publisher, including brands and businesses of all sizes. Because we’re passionate about all things technology, we often try out new platforms, and if successful, we’ll recommend them to our clients. We did some research and found that Flipboard’s readership breaks down to approximately one-third Millennial, one-third Gen-X, and one-third Boomer, and is split pretty evenly between Male and Female. Users are influential, curious, and affluent readers who invest in themselves by learning more about what they love. That sounded good to us, so decided to give it a try.
After signing up with Flipboard and going through their approval process (which included providing an RSS feed from our blog), we were able to create our own Flipboard Magazine, which you can see at https://flipboard.com/@Designsite. Our blog articles are now algorithmically indexed and surfaced in related topics in Smart Magazines across Flipboard. What’s nice too, is that once you’ve set up your Flipboard magazine, there’s no need to maintain it – every time you write a blog and add an image or video, it will automatically appear (beautifully) as your latest cover story. The way it works is that people will be directed to your website from Flipboard where they can read your blog/article. This means you have a new traffic stream, in addition to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
From the Sandbox to the Real World
After signing up with Flipboard, we kind of lost track of it because we’ve been so busy with projects. But earlier this week we received a “traffic spike” alert from our website analytics package. We went in to discover that over the last thirty days, 69.84% of referred traffic came from Flipboard, second only to Google’s direct traffic. Our latest blog received four-times more traffic than any previous blog. The added benefit, of course, was that it boosted other page traffic as well.
We went back to do a little more research and found that Parse.ly reported that “one key thing to note is that this (Flipboard to publisher) traffic almost exclusively comes from a tablet, phone or other mobile device; 99.4% of Flipboard’s referrals in the first half of June were via mobile. In fact, when we narrow our scope to mobile consumption, Flipboard becomes the fourth most common referrer to sites in our network, right behind Twitter.” This was amazing to read and in-line with our own website analytics.
Now, we can highly recommend helping our clients getting on board with Flipboard, helping them distribute to and connect with people who are passionate about their content – reaching a potential audience of over 145 million. That’s a good thing!
More information: Flipboard for Publishers
