Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 350th Tactical Psychological Operations, 10th Mountain Division, drop leaflets over a village near Hawijah in Kirkuk province, Iraq, on March 6, 2008. The leaflets are intended to promote the idea of self-government to area residents.

I’m a huge fan of relevance, context and community. Listen to people, reply, ask questions, add value and make friends. Then if you have questions or you’d appreciate their perspective or influence, reach out to them specifically.

In contrast to this, there are companies that load up content – quotes, links to interesting articles, things like that, and send them out to your network at large on a regular basis. I frankly hate this approach. The logic seems to be keep in front of potential clients at all times, so they don’t forget about you. Provide content, let them engage with it, then continue the conversation.

In theory it sounds good, but in actuality it seems to stuff your feed with irrelevant content. You become the king of non sequiturs, and your brand is watered down. People who value what you have to say would have to dig through a lot of other content posted by you to find it.

Here’s a different take on the same concept. Instead of blasting out a steady stream of content that’s not really relevant to no one in particular, what about promoting your own content at the right time to the right people? I’ll explain.

Let’s assume you have a blog. And that blog has categories and/or tags for each piece of content. Keep it open while you’re on Twitter or other social networks, and when you see conversations taking place about topics that you have blogged about. It could be as simple as search for words used on Twitter that match up with your blog categories and tags. When you find a post or discussion that aligns with your content, share a link to your content saying something like “I wrote about this subject not long ago,” or “I agree. I blogged about this.”

Hashtags and Twitter chats are probably the best ones to find to promote your content. Searches narrowed down to your connections would probably be best, too.