Right place right time... it's all in the planning

Love it or hate it (or love to hate it), Twitter seems to be allowing news to travel faster online than ever before.  A case in point occurred just last week when ‘Twifficiency’ was launched – a service which claims to calculate your Twitter efficiency. Our BusinessZone editor Dan Martin, identified the potential of this within the Twitter world and reported on it immediately.  Within just a few hours the feature was read by over 20,000 people and the article itself has been Tweeted over 630 times!

This kind of activity is great news for an online publisher like us – it may turn out to be a short-lived feature on the social media landscape, but our BusinessZone title received a healthy boost in page impressions as well as an increase in registrations of SME owners. 

An overheard conversation involving a client recently went along the lines of, “it’s a shame I can’t look into the future and sponsor hot topics such as that...”, referring of course to the Twifficiency feature.  In a world where advertisers are looking for the holy grail of integrating social media into their marketing strategy this poses a very interesting conundrum - How can you plan to be associated with relevant discussions that are yet to occur?

We may be great publishers, but we can’t predict the future and align your brand with a specific conversation that doesn’t exist yet. What you can do is make sure you’re in the right place at the right time – identify places where relevant discussions are likely to take place and make sure you’re there.

Whether you’re looking for brand association or simply want to be seen to be involved in relevant conversations there are still plenty of opportunities online to steal a march on your competitors. 

We’ve been encouraging our advertising clients to get involved in conversations with online communities for years and there are plenty of success stories to prove the value in doing this. So take some time to find out where your customers are talking online, consider the best approach to getting involved in the conversations and then go for it. With a little planning you’ll find yourself in the right place at the right time.

Posted by Ed Martin
Marketing Manager
Sift Media