entries and 90,000 new ‘likes’ (an increase of almost 10 per cent). The campaign success also boosted its brand partners who saw their likes increase 58 per cent.
Playboy uses a Twitter hashtag
(#FriskyFriday) to encourage reader contributions, offering female followers the opportunity to submit semi-nude or provocative images of themselves (a stunning number do so every day).
Playboy, Teen Vogue, and National
Geographic all use Instagram to share their best photos with their readers (356,000 for Teen Vogue, 251,000 for Playboy; 7,000 for National Geographic).
On a completely different existential
plane, Philosophy Now created a ‘Meetup Everywhere’ page, offering readers the opportunity to meet with one another in ‘real time’ to discuss philosophical topics. To date, 11,000 people have joined or expressed an interest in 33 groups in 26 cities in six countries. “Philosophy is the topic at this friendly, five-year old group. We sit in a circle and discuss a philosophical question we voted on by email. Sometimes this topic is taken from an issue of Philosophy Now magazine,” according to the description of the Santa Monica, California
90
group on the Philosophy Now Meetup site.
What’s the thinking behind a magazine’s successful use of social media? “Actually you have to be a journalist,” UK
Elle editor-in-chief Lorraine Candy told a PPA Publishing+ conference in 2012. “You have to know what information to put out there, you need to create conversation, you need to ask questions, you need to be very mindful and thoughtful of the tone you use in Twitter. It can’t just go out.”
There’s also the question of
how much content to give away, and how much to hold back.
“We don’t want to completely open
the doors, but just to create exclusive content and have a little bit of the door opening,” Candy told the PPA attendees.
Candy said they created a 10-second teaser
video of the Beckham cover shoot and put it on Elle’s site, while offering a full-length video for subscribers-only. Visitors to the site could also submit their own questions for Beckham, but his answers to the questions only appeared in the magazine.