You featured my company and it didn’t go viral !@#? Tips to maximise media coverage

By @SimonCocking.

We’re friendly, helpful people, you’ve probably worked that out by now. We’re here to tell interesting tech stories to the world. You know that we’re going in the right direction, we’ve already topped 11,500 unique views per day, viewed in over 150 countries on many days of the week. Therefore we can POTENTIALLY offer you a good audience to showcase your own particular stories.

BUT we’d like to share a few tips with you, to help us, to help you, to get your story out to the world. Because, good, and growing as we are, we can only do so much to help YOU to tell your story. Especially if you just sit back and expect your story to go viral by only sitting there in your underpants and shouting at the screen. As always we will aim to use humour to convey these ideas to you, but we are actually deadly serious too. Don’t say you weren’t told!

Don’t shoot the messenger 

Despite publishing as many stories, from as many parts of the world as possible, some stories we run are just not that interesting to the world. Perhaps your product is not that good. We can tell the world about it, but it might not be what they need, want or care about. Us featuring you and your article getting little or no traction might be the message you’re not ready to hear? Or maybe it’s great and you haven’t applied some of the following tips we are about to give you? Read on dear reader…

Engage with your audience, don’t just broadcast at them

To put it simply, bluntly even, poorly used Twitter accounts merely broadcast to the world. Their digital marketing person gets up on a Monday, dutifully sends several self promoting tweets that day. They then repeat again till Friday, or as many days as it is their job to do so, and then log off again until the next Monday, or whenever they are back in the office. There is zero engagement with any comments, no sharing of any other useful content, and very little value to those who had initially stopped by to see what was happening here. One company even complained that, from their point of view, us featuring them had lost them Twitter followers. While disregarding that fact that they had only tweeted 8 times in the last two months, and only self promoted their own content. No wonder they had lost followers, but as always, rather than look at your own digital marketing strategy (ie to engage rather than just broadcast to the world) it is far easier to shoot the messenger (see #1 for a refresher on that one).

Did you tell any one that you were featured? Did you share the story?

I kid you not but we have featured people and promoted their story, they have then said no one looked at it on Twitter or any of their other social media platforms. We then checked their Twitter feed etc, and discovered they never shared it once, let alone at optimal time zones for potential audiences. They never shared it, and simply expected(?) it to go viral based upon the fact that somewhere, once upon a time, someone once mentioned them.

What time of day did you share it?

We create the story, we feature you, we share it, but … Digital marketing is not a one time thing. Absolutely no one likes a spammer, and we’re not advocating mass repetition of the same story again and again. However you want to be global right? So what time of day did you post your piece? Irish breakfast time, US East coast breakfast time? Midwest, West coast? What about Singapore, they’re 7 hours ahead of us, and then there’s Australia too.

This is not a comprehensive list, but hopefully a few nuggets to get you started. Enjoy, thanks for reading, and do apply all of those that are relevant to you. Cheers S

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking