How a social media strategy can work for a magazine

Chief product officer at Forbes Media, Lewis DVorkin, explains how the brand’s content model is fuelling growth in areas other than just the print edition.

“Your content is everywhere.” When I hear those words, I’m not surprised. Still, I always ask those who say it, “What do you mean?” Then they talk about seeing our stories in their Facebook and Twitter news streams. Or, how websites they visit link to us (last month, 89,000 unique sites did that). Some recall a spirited Reddit discussion around a Forbes post, like this one with 3,200 comments. My favorite: “I follow some of your writers.” That means they’re getting our alerts in their email boxes.

I wrote awhile back that quality, quantity and variety is the ticket to digital success in the era of social media. That combination is now working for Forbes magazine, too. Last month, Forbes.com had a record 31.5 million unique visitors, as measured by Omniture. That was up from 18.5 million a year earlier. Our 1,000 knowledgeable writers — staff reporters, freelance journalists, authors, academics and topic experts — published nearly 8,000 posts, frequently 400 a day, across verticals like technology, investing, business, entrepreneurs and leadership.

Now, check out the newsstand numbers just above. In the first six months of this year, Forbes magazine single copy sales rose 4.3 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. By comparison, industry-wide magazine newsstand sales fells nine per cent in the same period and sales for publications in our direct competitive set dropped 15 per cent. Clearly, we’re bucking a trend.

Read the rest of this article on Forbes.