The Creator’s Guide to Flipboard

If you’re wondering how Flipboard can best help you meet your goals as a creator, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome!

This list represents all of our best practices and tips in one place. Feel free to pick and choose what works for you, although “The basics” are essential. Some aspects of Flipboard are automated, but, like other social platforms, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. Here’s how you can make sure you’re doing everything you can to succeed here. 

The basics: START HERE

✔️ Create a profile. This is your identity on Flipboard. Be sure you’ve added a display name, profile picture and short bio that explains who you are as well as a link to your site. For more details, read our post that describes how to make your profile shine.

✔️ Create a Magazine. A Flipboard Magazine is a curated collection of content from anywhere online, including articles, newsletters, videos, photos and podcasts. **It’s really important to note that anyone who clicks on a link inside of Flipboard is taken to the original source — a win for creators. Think of Flipboard as a beautify-ing browser. You’ll see traffic coming from us in your Google (or other) Analytics.**

Creators use Magazines for everything from packaging thematic stories to sharing links with like-minded creatives. They are a great way to rally people around content (including your own!) and generate views. Check out our collection of Magazines for examples. 

If you’re brand new to Flipboard, review the step-by-step of creating your first Magazine, but if you’re the TL;DR type, you should know to:

• Make sure your Magazine has a catchy title and a clear description. (You can also set a pretty cover — pick the thumbnail with the highest resolution.)
• Use the + button on the bottom of every story or the Create icon within Flipboard to flip stories into a Magazine. Add a caption if you like!
• Install the “Flip It” button to your browser bar to make it easy to add content from anywhere on the Web into a Magazine.
• Write a Note welcoming people to your Magazine. Pin it (or any item) to the start of the collection so it’s always visible.

✔️ Personalize your experience. Follow people, Magazines, or any of our 30,000+ topics, like #travel, #technology or #tiktok. Whatever you follow and engage with will influence what you see in your Home (“For You”) feed. Learn how to fine-tune your algorithmic feeds so you see the stories and sources you’re most interested in. 

Magazine pro tips

So you’ve got your profile set up and it has at least one Magazine on it. What’s next?

✔️ Create a Magazine for each content vertical. A best practice is to create Magazines for each of your specialties. For example, if you’re a travel blogger and you organize stories on your website by region, having a Magazine on Flipboard for each of those regions is the way to go. Why? By packaging stories in this way, you’re helping our algorithm more clearly know that the entire collection is an important source for its corresponding topic. In other words, what’s curated into a Magazine like National Parks Around the World could feed into our #nationalparks topic. And since the topic already has 1.4M followers, it’s a good place for travel writers to get discovered. Packaging stories in different Magazines also makes it easier for our editorial team to feature you in different places and contexts.

✔️ Apply to pipe an RSS feed into a Flipboard Magazine. After you publish something, it takes just a second to also share it on Flipboard by flipping it into a Magazine. That said, for some creators who publish at a high velocity or have a tendency to forget, having an RSS feed pipe into a Flipboard Magazine is an easy way to syndicate content to our platform. We developed this for publishers so it’s a bit of a hidden feature that requires review from our team. If you think this would help your strategy, log into your account at Flipboard.com, click on your avatar in the top right corner, then click Settings, then scroll down to Account Settings and select “Become a publisher.”

✔️ Invite others to curate with you in a Group Magazine. A Group Magazine can contain two people or hundreds, but in every case it’s an assortment of people who enjoy sharing stories together. Like regular Magazines, Group Magazines can be public or private. Anyone can follow a public Group Magazine, but in a private Group Magazine only the contributors can see what’s in it. Regardless of whether the Magazine is public or private, only the people you invite to be contributors can share stories into it. You can invite people to contribute to your Magazine by tapping on the plus in a circle next to your profile picture. Check out our “All About Group Magazines” blog post for more details. 

Other tips and tools 

OK — your profile is set up, your curation is humming, and you’re connecting with people on Flipboard. What should you try next, and how do you know how it’s all going?

✔️ Try Storyboards. While Flipboard Magazines are best for themes that have no beginning, middle or end, Flipboard Storyboards are better for lists, guides, roundups and other forms of finite curation. Storyboards offer more structure, such as the ability to organize by section, and space for copy and voice.

They also allow the creator to add up to five topics for distribution, and they’re a great vehicle for repurposing archival content that you would like to re-circulate. (Flipboard’s algorithms favor recency, making Storyboards a powerful tool for recirculating evergreen content. Why? With Storyboards, the whole collection gets a new timestamp; it doesn’t matter how old individual articles are.) One more thing: after publishing a Storyboard, flip it into a Flipboard Magazine to give it an extra boost.

The Storyboard tool is only available in private beta. If you would like to request access, please apply to our creator program and check off “Storyboard access” in the form.

✔️ Analytics. Now, you’re probably wondering how you can see how your content is faring on Flipboard. Log into your Flipboard account on the web at Flipboard.com, and click on your profile icon in the top right corner. Click on “Analytics” to see data on your Magazines and Storyboards, including opens, which links did well, and Magazine and profile follows generated. If you want to drill down even further, click on your profile icon again and go to Profile. You’ll notice a little bar graph on each cover. Click on that to see URL opens, impressions and click-through rate (CTR) over the last 30 days.

Spread the word 

Your success on Flipboard is in your hands. As with other platforms, it’s a good idea to tell people about your presence here and encourage them to check it out and help spread the word. 

✔️ Add your Flipboard profile to your email signature.

✔️ Add Flipboard to your social icons on your site. Our logo looks real pretty next to your Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube icons. Link the “Flipboard F” to your profile URL. You can grab approved assets, like our logo, on our tools page. or look for Flipboard in the menu of the social plugin provider you use on your site.    

✔️ Add Flipboard to your share icons at the story level. By adding Flipboard to your share icons at the story level, you’re empowering your community to do their part to help share your work in their own Flipboard Magazines. You can grab that icon on our tools page.

✔️ Embed a widget on your site. Back on our social tools page, you’ll find code to embed Magazine or Storyboard widgets on your site, in a newsletter, at the foot of an article, etc. These widgets make for attractive sidebars and interesting jumping-off points for further exploration. (And remember: all these links inside the widget just redirect to your own site.)

Go deeper with Flipboard

✔️ Join our Exchanges. There are a few Group Magazines hosted by Flipboard that serve as cool entry points to collaborative curation and finding others who are also passionate about things like cooking, traveling, photography and the environment. Read more about our Exchanges, and how to score an invite, here.

✔️ Apply to the Creator Collective. Apply to be an official creator on Flipboard and tell us who you are! A subset of applicants will be hand-picked to join the Flipboard Creator Collective. Members of the Creator Collective are treated like publishers on our platform and are eligible to participate in promotional and monetization programs. Learn more and find the application in my recent post. 

✔️ Further reading. Check out these posts with best practices for different types of content creators. 

We’ll continue to write more guides so keep an eye on the “creators tag” on our blog for the latest.

Whew. If you’ve read this far, thank you! We hope this information is helpful. There’s so much goodness to explore here and tips that a lot of people are just starting to discover. 

If you’ve got a question we haven’t answered, or would just like to connect, please contact [email protected] and someone will get back to you soon. 

— Mia Q., head of creator community, is curating Creator #MagsWeLove