Good Old Flipboard!!

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   TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years ago

   When Eugbug first brought Flipboard to my attention, I felt like I didn't want to bother with it.  Shortly thereafter, I signed up, and the first week or so it brought me around 20,000 views.  Since then, views mostly have been minimal...BUT...once in awhile I get a nice little view bump from them.  This just happened again.
   
   When one of my articles moves up to the niche sites, I immediately put it on Flipboard.  Sometimes doing this really pays off.
   
   Last week I wrote two hubs that were almost immediately put on the niches.  Yesterday, I put them on Flipboard, and this morning, between the two of them, I have picked up an extra 1,000 views.  I have never gotten that many with Twitter, Google+, FB or even Pinterest, even though I get some views from all of them regularly and sometimes a nice amount from Pinterest.
   
   So, thanks Eugbug for letting me know about this option. They still have some glitches in the way they post things, but sometimes the views are still decent.

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      eugbugposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks TT2!  I still get a small trickle of traffic and like you submit every time a hub is shifted to a niche site (got 1000 views over the last couple of days for 1 hub). It would be great if they would allow us to choose the category of our flips, maybe that's something which will come down the pipeline, I'm still having hubs categorized bizarrely!

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   Glenn Stokposted 7 years ago

   I'm noticing the same thing. I wait to put my new hubs into Flipboard because lately all my new hubs are moved to network niche sites within 48 hours of publication. That's when I flip them.
   
   The reason why Flipboard works better for hubs on niche sites is that they get properly tagged.
   
   I just noticed an increase in views on one of my flipped hubs too. When I looked at the traffic source, sure enough it was from Flipboard.
   
   By the way, when any of your older hubs get moved to niche sites, don't forget to deleted the old URL from Flipboard and flip the hub again with the new niche site URL.

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      TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

      You lost me on that one.  Whatever I flip always comes from the hubs already on the niche sites...so why would I change the URL?  It's the one I use to do the flip.  Any advice here?

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         Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         What I meant was that if you had already flipped a hub prior to being moved, then you need to removed it from Flipboard and flip it again with the new URL at the niche site.
         
         Although the old URL will redirect to the niche site, it still may have been tagged to the wrong category in Flipboard. But by flipping again once it's in a niche site, you'll have a better chance of getting into the correct category. At least that's what I've noticed. It doesn't always work, but it is working better for niche sites being tagged to the right category.

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            TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks, but I'm still having problems with the tagging issue, even though I only flip after the niche site move.  I'm noticing that certain keywords get picked up despite the actual topic you're writing about, ie...money.  If the word money is in your title, it's going to be tagged "money", even though you may be writing about RV financials.

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               Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

               Yes, I discovered that too. The thing I do to try to avoid that is to review the words I use before I flip a hub. If I find I'm using too many of the same word that is not related to the subject (such as "money" in your RV hubs), I remove some of them or replace them with synonyms. That helps avoid Flipboard from tagging in the wrong topic.
               
               That strategy never worked with hubs in HubPages, but for some reason I found it works with hubs in niche sites.  Maybe because the niche sites already have a clue of what the subject matter is. Even with that, it does't always work. However, I found that it's worth the effort.

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                  TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  I felt they were getting the tag from the title, not what was in the content.

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                     Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                     Their algorithm seems to examine everything (title, content, url, and meta data) to determine the topic to be tagged.

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                        TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                        Too bad it does such a poor job of getting it right!  They should do what HP used to do and allow us to categorize our own articles.  I think that would make a huge difference in views.

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               DrMark1961posted 7 years agoin reply to this

               I have noticed the same thing at times. I flipped an article on hair loss in dogs and the article was posted under hair. I tweeted it though, and a few hours later it showed up on the dogs topic page, so someone must have seen it.
               I do use that tweet share button and recommend you use it.
               I recently went over 100,000 page views on Flipboard since I first signed up for it after reading Eugenes forum a few months ago. It is definitely worth the time.
               I have noticed that articles with good visuals and a great title get a lot more page views. The photo at the top of the hub should be long, not tall, since tall photos get chopped up and the readers cannot tell what you are posting. (I think the correct term would be landscape?)

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                  TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  Which tweet share button do you mean?  The one on the hub you write or is there one on twitter?  I'm not quite sure about the linkage you are discussing as per Flipboard.  You obviously have done very well with that site, but you also write on an extremely popular topic and have the creds to go with it. Great combo and nice big audience, too.

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                     DrMark1961posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                     Underneath the flip button is a like button, and underneath that is a share button. I have only shared a few articles with followers, but click the share button almost every time to share on twitter. (When that window pops up there is a little twitter symbol. I click that.) A few of them are retweeted, and Flipboard likes them, so I think someone must be seeing them.
                     Thanks. I thought most social media was a waste of time before joining this site. A lot of times I have found interesting articles about dogs, my country, and some great esoteric subjects that I would not even have found before this site.

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                  Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  You're absolutely right Mark. However, we also have to find a decent compromise with the way HubPages handles the top image and the way Flipboard displays it.
                  
                  Lately I've been making my top images square. The reasoning is that if there is important image detail on the sides of a landscape image or near the top or bottom of a vertical image, then that detail will get chopped off in the icon that HubPages creates to promote the hub.
                  
                  Everyone should take a good look at how the images look in the hub listing on their profile. I see some Hubbers who have text on the top image and most of it gets chopped off. Text only works well for a top image if it's square.  Sorry, I think I'm rambling on and getting slightly off topic.

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                     DrMark1961posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                     Yes, I think square would work fine with the niche sites too. I am going to try and edit all of mine and crop all of the pictures.

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                     CatherineGiordanoposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                     What I do with my top image is make is the most important part of the image and any text shows up in the thumbnail that HP creates. But I make sure I have a rectangle shape longer in width than in height because I like to past them in facebook and liles rectangles. I test it in facebook sometimes before publishing.  I'll do the picture over until it looks good in both formats. Thanks for telling me about fipboard's preferences. It sounds like my rectangles should be fine.

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                        CatherineGiordanoposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                        I just checked my flipboard mag. some of the pictures are rectangle and some are square. I guess the bots do the graphic design. So I'm thinking it is good to make sure  it the top  picture looks good in both shapes.

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                           Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                           It all depends on what you're focusing on. If you want the top pictures to look good for the thumbnail on HubPages, then square is the safe way to go. This will avoid having the sides cut off on the thumbnail. You'll notice that all your thumbnails on your profile listing are square no matter what the dimensions of the actual image is.
                           
                           As for flipboard, the dimensions of an image does not matter. They handle just about anything, as you noticed. However, the thing to be concerned about for flipboard is that they sometimes enlarge your image tremendously, and if you don't have enough pixels, it will become pixilated on flipboard.

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                              CatherineGiordanoposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                              Good info. I'll watch the pixels. My point about the Hp top picture is that you can use a rectangle which I find the most visually attractive, just make sure any text and the most vital parts of the picture fall into the square.  Let's say your hub is about log cabins and you have a picture of a log cabin in the woods. It is fine if the trees on either side of the log cabin get cut off as long as the cabin itself stays in the square. I just take a look at it when I first insert it into the capsule. If is not visually pleasing, I redo the picture withphoto editing tools.

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                                 Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

                                 Very good explanation. That works. I also check the thumbnail to be absolutely sure when I'm not using a square image.

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               Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

               I did a quick scan of your summaries of all your hubs. I see you have many references to money. This is probably why Flipboard tags some of your hubs under "money". These are the keywords you are using:
               
               Saving money, save money, zero cost, overpaying, financial interests, save you a fortune, spending your money, living totally rent free.
               
               I'm not telling you to change it. I'm just bringing this to your attention since you were wondering about it. I know why you are using those terms as they relate to the subject of the RV's, but the flipboard bots don't consider that.

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                  TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

                  Makes sense, but there are many others that don't have those key words that still get misplaced.  They really need to work on that!

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   EricDockettposted 7 years ago

   I've been thinking of checking this out but it seems like I can't really see how it works until I sign up for it. Grr! 
   
   I have three main HubPages accounts, each with separate social media accounts (Twitter, FB, G+). If I signed up for Flipboard I would want a different user name for each of my HP accounts.
   
   So, my question is: Do I have to sign up three times, with three different user names? Or, can I sign up once with a user name nobody ever sees and then create boards under each of my HP user names?

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      TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

      You can use one user name for Flipboard because the way it works is that you set up your account with that name (which is for Flipboard and does not relate to your other accounts), develop your magazines and then add articles of yours as well as others as you see fit.  It's really quite simple once you get the hang of it.  It doesn't matter where the other articles come from.

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      eugbugposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      I just signed up with my real name and then flip content from all my online identities/accounts.
      You could create boards with names representative of the hub content associated with each of your HP accounts.

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   eugbugposted 7 years ago

   Have a look at this Flipboard Twitter account. They request shares of mags which get placed in their #MagsWeLove compendium of favourite magazines.
   
   Edit: Forgot the URL. Here it is:
   https://twitter.com/FlipboardMag

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      Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the tip Eugene. #MagsWeLove has almost 242,000 followers! I just tagged them in a tweet about one of my magazines.

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      TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

      So how exactly do you add a mag when you do this?  I'm just awful with Twitter and the hash tag thing.  Show me an example, can you?

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         eugbugposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         According to the description under the avatar on their Twitter page (i.e. "Flipboard Magazines"), you use the #MyMagazine tag. However their magazine is #MagsWeLove, so I'm not quite sure which tag they mean us to use. Anyway what I presume you do to share a magazine with them is hit the "Tweet to Flipboard Magazine" button on their profile page and then say something like:
         
         @FlipboardMag Checkout my magazine about x, y and z here: URL #MyMagazine
         
         Replace URL in your tweet by the URL of your chosen mag and maybe include a suitable cover photo

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            TIMETRAVELER2posted 7 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks. I'll give it a try.

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               Glenn Stokposted 7 years agoin reply to this

               If you want to see how I tweeted it, following Eugene's post above, see my tweet I did with the hashtag #MagsWeLove.

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