The Medium Writer’s Guide to Flipboard

Flipboard
3 min readJan 31, 2023

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Illustration of a pair of hands typing on a laptop keywords with letters flying off the screen

Dear Medium community,

It takes courage to put one’s thoughts on a page and then press publish — I am speaking from experience. Kudos to everyone who uses this beautiful platform to express themselves and share their expertise. We have so much respect for you. Creation is hard work!

I’d like to show you how Flipboard can help make that effort pay off even more, generating new readers and reach.

Getting your Medium story into Flipboard

It starts with one simple action: the flip. In the same way you pin to get content into Pinterest, Flipping is how writers get their pieces distributed within Flipboard’s rich ecosystem and potentially “reflipped” by others who also want to share their work. With over 100M downloads and 30,000 topics, Flipboard is home to a vibrant community of people and publishers who read, share and create stories about everything from sourdough baking to emotional intelligence to cryptocurrency.

You can flip a story from Medium into Flipboard one of two ways:

  1. Using the Flip It button on your browser bar (get it here and drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar).
  2. Going to Flipboard and locating the “create icon” to create a flip. Enter your Medium link in the link field, write a caption if you wish, and then select the Magazine it’s to go into.
The “create icon” on Flipboard with the words Create a flip” next to it.

What’s a Magazine, you ask?

A Magazine is the container or collection that houses your flips on Flipboard. You can create as many Magazines as you like, and you can flip content from anywhere on the Web into a Magazine. (Just make sure it has a distinctive name and a clear description.)

For instance, you could create one Magazine for all your Medium stories and/or you could create one for any subtopics you care about. You can mix Medium links with content from other places and platforms, sharing your expertise in any area. Here are a few examples:

  • Turn your Medium publication into a beautiful Magazine
    Medium itself distributes its publications on Flipboard in the form of Magazines like Zora and Human Parts. Flipboard offers a visual and fun way to consume content.
  • Highlight a collective of writers in one place
    This person has a Group Magazine that shares Medium posts from their ILLUMINATION publication.
  • Place your Medium work next to content from anywhere on the Web
    This person mixes poetry from Medium with items and images from Twitter.
  • Keep the conversation alive through curation
    I wrote a Medium piece about how I planned to cement my writing practice in 2023. By putting it in my Betterment Magazine, I’ve added my voice to the subject matter. The Mag also allows me to create a resource people can follow without having to continually produce all the content myself (since 99% of this Magazine is curated from other sources).

How your Medium story gets traffic on Flipboard

Alright, now that you have the basics about how to get your Medium post into Flipboard, as well as some ideas of how to organize those Magazines, it’s worth a look under the hood so you can understand how this works.

Once a story is flipped into Flipboard, our algorithm analyzes the piece and assigns topic tags, telling our system that the story is eligible to appear in relevant topic feeds. For example, if you write about machine learning and flip your Medium piece into your machine learning Magazine on Flipboard, that story should also appear in the #machinelearning topic, which already has almost 800K followers.

You will see any traffic generated from Flipboard in your Medium analytics, under “Stats”:

A screenshot of views by traffic source on Medium, which shows the following:  Internal B 48%,  External referrals 52%,  linkedin.com 46,  email, IM, and direct 32,  flipboard.com 23,  duckduckgo.com 12,  Android device (not Medium app) 7,  twitter.com 7,  news.google.com 2,  google.com 2.
A peek at my Medium analytics, featuring flipboard.com as a referrer

With regular flipping, you should see Flipboard rise as a referrer and hopefully become a key engine for your success.

Mia Quagliarello, head of creator community, is sharing her Medium posts into Flipboard in Magazines like Betterment and Mia’s Queue.

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Flipboard

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