People Magazine Launches Custom Social Platform

Folio reporting:
As more and more women turn to social media for information and interaction, so is People magazine. The Time Inc. title has launched “Your Turn” within its website—its own social platform that allows users to contribute to and share with People.com.
By visiting YourTurn.People.com users can upload photos for various “challenges” that are tied to engaging news or trending topics on the site. To participate, a user shares images from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or a desktop computer. Submissions are also collected from different social networks by using a People.com determined hash tag that coincides with a specific challenge.
“We’ve been collecting user photos over the past few years—we’ve offered a lot of different challenges for readers, from Halloween to show us your cute pets,” says Janice Morris, managing editor for People Digital. “But we never had one place to house all the images and we never did it consistently, instead treating it as a special event. We wanted to give readers more of a turnkey platform to work with because it’s so easy to upload now with all the social tools, and hash tags make it easy to share and communicate.”
To take advantage of the presidential election buzz, for example, People asked readers to share pictures of themselves voting. Using the hash tag #YTIVoted, users could tweet or use Instagram to share their images with the magazine, which were then uploaded to this social platform in the “Share Your Voting Pics” challenge section. Morris says the brand hopes to roll out a new challenge everyday, though testing is still taking place to determine the best frequency.
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