FlipBoard: Celebrating a Custom, Niche Experience

How do you get your news? Well, I like to read about business, lifestyle, performance art, photography, parenting, and politics (not always in that order!) Though I still receive and read the newspaper, I find joy in the custom experience that is FlipBoard. Celebrating five years and tremendous growth, I am not the only one. BGR.com calls it a content revolution. And it is. BGR’s article, “Inside a Content Revolution Five Years in the Making,” looks back with FlipBoard creators to see how far the idea has come. In the article, Founder Mike McCue says, “It was this notion of a social or personal magazine you could customize. We still believe, at our core, that great content can change the world. For us, it’s always been about finding the best content, even if it’s niche.”

And I think it’s a fabulous outlet for niche publications and their corresponding social content. You can now choose topics (34,000 topics to be exact) that RSS feeds will fill and filter from arts and culture, to entrepreneurship, to sports, to zoology. It’s exciting to think that pass-along readership has evolved to create more than 15 million FlipBoard collections of content or “magazines” according to BGR.

So, when writing and publishing niche content whether you’re a professional association, non-profit or small business, remember that your readers are not only your members, donors or subscribers, they are also discerning consumers with new and beautiful ways to select content — your content.

— Andrea Exter, Cofounder, Monarch Media & Consulting, Inc.