Hosting your digital edition on the Exact Editions platform comes with many benefits besides the opportunity to sell digital subscriptions, including a smorgasbord of free marketing tools accessible at the click of a button.

One of these such tools is Exact Editions’ innovative Reading Rooms. Available in the Publisher Portal, the tool comprises links through which you can distribute time-limited access to either your latest issue or the full archive for a time-limited period of an hour, a day, a week or 30 days.

Social media is a particularly powerful use of this tool, permitting you to simultaneously promote content to your wider audience, showcase the archive and encourage subscriptions. In the below guide you can find information, tips and tricks to ensure that your Reading Rooms links across all reach their maximum impact on social media. 

Best Practice Guide: Reading Rooms on Social Media

  1. Please ensure that you are using the original Reading Room link generated through the Publisher Portal, and not a second-hand link copied from the address bar of a browser, as this will lead users to a paywall instead of immediate access. 
  2. As the original links are lengthy, you can use a URL shortener such as Bitly to shrink them into more compact links, freeing up more characters in your posts.
  3. The Reading Room will close at a predetermined moment, which the publisher sets when they create it (i.e. the ‘expires’ date and time under the link itself). Once it expires, users will be re-directed to a ‘page not available’ site and all access to the content will cease.
  4. Any user will remain ‘logged in’ to the Reading Room until this expiry date. However, if a user clicks on a link a minute before it is about to expire, there is a two-day leeway before this new user is logged out.
  5. The usage data for the Reading Room will not only be reported to your publisher account, but you can gain more detailed insights by hooking up your Google Analytics account to the digital edition (just ask one of the Exact Editions team!)

If following the above guidelines, Reading Room links can be used effectively on social media to drive traffic to the digital edition and showcase the outstanding archives included within them.

One such recent example is Crafts Magazine, who shared their whole archive ‘to brighten up isolation’ and have seen a huge surge in online traffic. 

So there you have it — post away!

Please contact publisher@exacteditions.com with any queries and we’ll be happy to help.