Flipboard Advances Curation with New Storyboards and Analytics
"Curation gives people and publishers a way to bring their perspective, expertise or ideas to others. This belief has been at the heart of Flipboard from the start and we've continued to innovate around this concept for the last 10 years," said Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO. "Distinct from Flipboard Magazines, Storyboards offer a new format that brings structure and voice to curation, enabling rich, insightful collections that can be featured both on and off Flipboard's platform."
Select publishing partners have been able to experiment with this new curation format by participating in a beta program. Flipboard collaborated with just over 100 publishers and avid users who were able to share direct feedback with the company's engineering, product design and editorial teams. As a result of this collaboration, the Curator Pro tool is intuitive, the analytics provide insights valuable to publishers, and Storyboards have already become a new way to drive traffic to publisher sites.
In the last couple of months, the first Storyboards have been created by Flipboard's editorial team, including "Call to Action: Ways You Can Help" and "Camping Gear for the Great Outdoors," and beta testers, such as TheGrio's "Minneapolis Protests and the Truth About George Floyd," National Geographic's "40 Years After the Mount St. Helens Eruption" and Popular Science's "How To Sleep Better Tonight." Today, thousands of additional publishers and influencers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia will receive access to Curator Pro. It will be available in Germany, France, Italy and Spain later this summer with more countries to follow.
The New Curator Pro Tool
Starting today, verified accounts of publishers and influencers on Flipboard have access to the new curation tool. Verified users can access Curator Pro through a new module, "Create Storyboard," available on the desktop view of their Flipboard Profile. The web-based Curator Pro tool has open fields where creators write a Storyboard headline and description, select a main image and add URLs to include in the Storyboard. The URLs included in Storyboards can be links to articles, videos, livestreams, products, photos, Flipboard magazines, social posts as well as newsletter sign-up pages and anything with a URL. These items can be organized into "sections" with up to 10 links in each — for example, CNBC's Storyboard, "George Floyd: Seeds of Change," has sections called Leaders Speak Out and Working Together and Talking to Your Kids, giving a broad view into their coverage.
Before publishing a Storyboard, the curator can choose up to five topics that are relevant to the content in the Storyboard, which will improve its discoverability in Flipboard. Once a Storyboard is published, the creator is given an option to share the entire package through Flipboard Magazines, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and email; there is an embeddable widget that is available on Flipboard's tools page. Storyboards will be displayed to the user's Flipboard followers as well as to people who follow related topics. This unique curated package of stories is an asset that can live on and off Flipboard and is expected to give publishers a way to grow their viewership in new and innovative ways.
Once the Storyboard is live, the creator can look at their profile page to view Storyboard analytics, including number of views, opens and social engagement metrics such as likes, comments and flips. For the first time, Flipboard is providing these self-service insights for publishers and influencers interested in understanding their audience engagement on the platform.
SOURCE Flipboard
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