Visiting, and browsing physical stores can be, and is often, a social experience. Browsing your Flipbooks should also be! The easiest way to reach your new, and existing customers, is to be where they are, and, digitally speaking, that means promoting your Flipbooks on social media (SoMe).

Social Media should be a focus on your catalog promotion, and this guide helps you consider what can really make an impact, when sharing your digital catalog.

General considerations:

Channel specific considerations:

Each social media channel is defined by its own unique features, and the type of audiences that these attract. Understanding these can help you plan and structure the way in which you share your catalog across different channels.

Each social media channel has its own way of surfacing relevant content to its users: an algorithm. Understanding how each channel's algorithm works should be crucial to ensure you can maximize the impact your Flipbook makes when you share it.

Additionally, keeping up to date with the trends dominating different channels can help you better optimize the content you promote on different channels.

As not all trends might will be relevant to your business, one effective method of identifying relevant, and important trends for your business is to set up Google alerts for them. You can set these up to alert you of specific topics, or influencers in your industry, and leverage them to put relevant content out when everybody is talking about it.

You probably have a pretty good idea of who your customers are, and what common traits or demographics they share. Even though your target audience might be present across all the SoMe channels in which you operate, consider that they probably seek different things depending on which social media channel they are using.

Your audience might have different expectations of what media they want to consume across different social media channels. Ideally, you should keep this in mind and adapt how you present content to best suit the limitations and expectations of each channel.

When it comes to marketing and communication, you hear it all the time, but we can’t stress this enough: always keep testing. Testing allows you to assess what your audience likes, responds to and engages with. Ultimately, testing can inform you of whether these certain lead to more, or fewer sales.

There are many factors and variables you can test, within your Flipbooks, including:

Do you know which devices your users use, to consume your content? It's important to adapt your assets with this in mind.

Today, the vast majority of users consume social media from a mobile device. As such, it would be a safe bet to put efforts in developing a mobile-first browsing experience, with vertical assets, optimized for mobile screens.

Nonetheless, like no two businesses are completely alike, your audience is unique to your business. Optimizing for different devices comes down to your specific situation, and which channels you want to focus on. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook may still have a significant portion of traffic that visits from a desktop.

Regardless, by adopting a mobile-first strategy can work for your desktop visitors too. Vertical assets tend to also perform well on every device and will provide a good viewing experience for those that browse Instagram and TikTok from a desktop.

Social media can be a powerful traffic driver to your Flipbook. Even here, there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to social media sharing.

SoMe platforms have differing ways of allowing you to share URLs; Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, allow you to link directly in a post, whereas Instagram and TikTok do not allow any clickable links on posts in the main feed.

As such, identify which SoMe platforms are most important to your business and research the optimal ways of sharing content on them.

We can't stress it enough: copy is important. Often, visitors will stop for an image but stay for the copy.

Get to know the requirements and constraints of the social media platforms you are sharing on, and tailor your messaging to it. For example, if Twitter limits you to 280 characters, ensure your copy doesn't exceed this!

When writing engaging text to promote your digital catalog, make sure your main message stays on the first line, as the platforms usually hide the rest of the text.

Depending on your brand, and your target audience, consider using emojis. Studies have shown that using them can increase your click-through rate on share links! Hashtags can also be an important element.

When promoting your Flipbook on SoMe, keep in mind what result you want to achieve with this. Is it to generally increase your catalog's reach? Is there a promotion you want to promote, specifically? A product you would like to focus on?

You control what you share on social media: as such you can link directly to specific pages within your digital catalog to fast-track your audience to new sections, specific promotions, or products, etc. Alternatively, you can link them to the catalog as whole, and allow them to decide how, and where to browse it.

Social Media platforms are constantly changing the rules of the game, and by staying on top of the optimal, preferred formats and dimensions for each social channel, you'll be ablt to deliver an optimized sharing experience.

Check their recommended specs for each SoMe platform you intend to share your Flipbook on, as there is no universal standard. We've linked to some of the most popular platforms below:

LinkedIn is a powerful SoMe platform, especially if you run a B2B business. The platform also is robust in terms of how you can share your digital catalog. For example:

Don’t be afraid to try new things: LinkedIn is getting less serious and people are having more fun there. Don’t be afraid to explore gifs, animations, humor in your messaging, etc. This should always try to emulate your brand's personality.

Instagram is probably the most visual social media platform, today. As such, it's important to make sure your visuals are striking, and beautiful in order to stand out in your audience's feeds.

Facebook is arguably the most robust platform for sharing your digital catalog, in terms of formats and functions, available to you.

You can share your catalog directly from your business page, by pasting the link to your digital catalog in the post field. Facebook will automatically generate a share post based on your digital catalog's metadata, and generate a beautiful image, like the example above.

You can also edit the share image that Facebook automatically generates, to a custom image of your choice.

Depending on your digital catalog's URL, you might want to consider using a link shortener to make your post more harmonious. Unlike LinkedIn, for example, Facebook does not automatically shorten your URL. There are, however, several platforms that you can use for free, like Bit.ly or TinyURL.

Facebook allows for the use of videos, images and gifs when sharing a post. This opens up for a lot of possibilities in terms of what visual assets you can use to make your post stand out from the rest, in the Facebook feed.

The key here, is again, to test different versions and see what works best. You can use Facebook's own recommendations to make sure your posts adhere to their best practice guidelines:

One of Facebook's many features when posting is the ability to boost your post. While this method is paid-for, by boosting your share post, Facebook will make sure that any followers of your page are sure to see your post when they log on to Facebook. Boosted posts, much like Facebook ads, can be used to reach out to specific audiences across Facebook, such as users that already match the same criteria as your existing followers.

TikTok is the youngest of the social media channels on this list. It is however, already the third largest social media platform by monthly users, and attracts by far, the youngest demographic.

Depending on your brand, TikTok could be a powerful platform through which to share your digital catalog. Like its competitor, Instagram, TikTok is a purely visual format. Where it differs from its counterpart is that, unlike Instagram, the expectation of stunning, curated visuals is not as high. Instead users expect to see, and hear, short videos, or reels, from influencers, and people they follow.

Consider thus, what influencers represent your audience demographic and explore the opportunities available to you in terms of influencer campaigns that will put the spotlight on your digital catalog. This is a great example of influencer campaigns at work on TikTok!