The Next Big Thing for Marketers: Social Magazines

3 Reason Social Magazines Are Important to Marketers

1. Noise Reduction – Many marketers today are working to get social opt-ins on Twitter and Facebook in hopes of getting their content included in the information stream of prospective customers. The problem is that, for many people, their social streams are filled with too much content, and much of it gets lost in the crowd. Because social magazines help to filter and better display social streams, it is likely less content will be lost to noise and companies will have better opportunities to connect.

2. A Return to Visuals – Successful traditional print and offline marketing has been dominated by great visuals and tight copy. Today Twitter streams, RSS readers and online news sources are dominated by catchy headlines and bullet points. Social magazine prioritize the value of powerful images in online storytelling. Blog posts with powerful images that help illustrate the message of the post will translate well to this new method of media consumption. Pictures now have a greater impact on who reads your content.

3. Social Segmentation – Many large companies still publish magazines and distribute them to their B2B customers as a method of nurturing and educating potential buyers. Social magazines allow potential buyers to create their own magazine that is most relevant to them. This relevancy means that potential customers are more likely to read the magazines they create instead of the magazines that marketers print and mail to them. Marketers will need to shift focus and make it easy for content to be included in social magazines by providing RSS feeds and aggregating content through social media.

We now live in a world in which every tablet owner has become the editor of their own personal digital magazine. Our challenge as marketers is to create interesting content for our perspective customers and provide simple methods for them to include it in their own social magazines.    

I am still a RSS Feedreader users, but a lot of my friends prefer the nice look and feel of social magazines. Tools like Feedly in the browser or Flipboard on the iPad and others seem to guide the way to a new reading experience: Users compile their own social magazines based on their RSS feeds, tags and interests. And we as marketeers need to provide valuable content to get read!