Follow your niche

As if you didn’t know already, blogs are important. I’m positive you know this, because you’re reading this one. I bring this up because during yesterday’s professional development meeting we discussed the importance of social media in business.

Our presenter, Rosh Sillars, is a professional photographer who has photographed many of our clients as well as celebrities from Britney Spears to Helio Castroneves. He also knows a thing or two about blogging and the positive ways companies and individuals grow and start their business.

Before I go any further – in case you’re wondering – professional development meetings are done almost every Thursday at Eisbrenner. Each meeting involves a topic that helps the team to refine or develop their professional skills.

Rosh brought up an interesting topic today, something that I haven’t given much thought to, the “Long Tail” effect. The idea is that content which caters to a niche is often more profitable than appealing to the masses. Blogging to a niche audience like students interested in PR, for example, has a much greater chance of gaining an audience than if I were to blog about world news, which is of course, a highly saturated market.

Although focusing on a niche appeals to a smaller group of people, they are much more engaged and are more likely to seek out your information. The opposite is true of a mass audience, which is less likely to seek your information on broad topics and generally turn to the most popular sources for information.

Rosh gave a good example of this when he explained how posting a blog about his Britney Spears shoot gathered plenty of attention immediately, but did little for him in the long-run because there is already so much on the Web about her. However, his blog about a photo shoot of food for Cake Nouveau, a bakery in Ann Arbor remains practical because food photography is a niche market, which only has a few people blogging about it.