By Todd Lappin
You’re not just a blogger or content publisher — you’re a media brand. Content is the tool you use to make your brand come to life, which means that in addition to a blog, you may also share content via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Each expresses your brand in a distinctive way, but it’s also challenging to weave all the threads together in a single place.
Flipboard can help. Flipboard makes it easy to collect all the content you love from all your social networks and websites in a beautiful, paginated package that looks fantastic on mobile devices or the web. We call these collections Flipboard Magazines, and so far more than 4 million of them have been created by people who use them to publish and share their favorite articles, photos, products, and videos.
But what are Flipboard MagMakers doing with their magazines? We love seeing all the creative ways people use their magazines, but if we had to group them together, here are the common types we see:
1) The CollectionMag
A CollectionMag is a place to save and organize content that relates to your own hobbies, interests or passions. The items you add to a CollectionMag may be interesting, or useful, or relevant, or inspiring, or worth revisiting later, but first and foremost, it’s material you curate for yourself — although if anyone else happens to enjoy it, that’s fine, too. CollectionMags are handy for saving favorite products into catalogs or gift guides, but they’re also great for cooking ideas. In a Soup by Poonammaj is a great example of a CollectionMag; it’s a curated cookbook of soup recipes.
2) The ThemeMag
A ThemeMag curates content about a specific (and sometimes quirky) idea. ThemeMags are often visual or photo-driven, and they are intended for public sharing and consumption — preferably among like-minded enthusiasts. A ThemeMags is born when a Flipboard MagMaker notices a “particular kind of something” in the world, and the scope of that particular kind of something becomes more compelling when they curate a lot of it, all in one place. For example, did you know that many cars want to learn how to fly? We didn’t either, until we found Flugplatz, a Flipboard Magazine for cars that wish they were airplanes.
3) The NewsMag
Think of these as curated news magazines or digital newsletters. NewsMags are meant for general consumption, and they provide a timely, ongoing feed of information for a specific community of readers. A NewsMag can be about a place, a topic, a business, a cause, a hobby, an industry, a brand, or a band. NewsMags can include just about any kind of content, and many take advantage of the fact that Flipboard magazines can combine different sources all in one place. Idaho travel website Twin Falls Guide uses a Flipboard NewsMag to balance hard news with local recreation and lifestyle coverage.
4) The EventMag
These magazines document an event or experience. “We went here. We did that.” EventMags can combine perspectives, photos and videos from multiple participants or co-contributors. Although the period of active curation for an EventMag may may be limited, the magazine itself can live on indefinitely as a shared scrapbook or souvenir. That’s the purpose of “Graduation 2013” a magazine created by Texas’s Spring Branch Independent School District to commemorate the district’s graduation ceremonies:
5) The UtilityMag
UtilityMags are convenient, mobile-friendly replacements for traditional print products: Educational course readers, portfolios, training manuals, brochures and the like. These magazines gather material with a functional purpose, and they are intended for widespread sharing. UtilityMags are often created by educators, marketers, realtors, creative professionals and managerial professionals. CA Technologies uses a UtilityMag to share how to tips and technical information about the company’s SiteMinder software package.
This post was sponsored by Flipboard.
