Have you set up your blog so that it automatically posts to Facebook and Twitter any time you publish a new post? Do you announce a new contest or promotion on social media and wait patiently for your followers to share it with their networks? While sharing engaging blog posts and social media promotions right away is good, you can do better. Use the tips below to improve your social sharing strategy.

Find Out When Your Audience is Active
If your followers flock to Facebook and Twitter from 4:00 to 7:00PM, but you post every day at 10:30AM, your updates will be old news by the time they arrive. Granted, Facebook’s algorithm attempts to show

relevant content to users that they haven’t yet seen. However, Twitter displays the latest real-time tweets, pushing older ones far off the page in a matter of minutes. Thus, it’s crucial to understand when your audience is active so that you can interact at the same time. Use Facebook Insights to learn more about your audience. Third party services such as Tweriod are available to help you better understand when your Twitter audience is active.

Continue Immediate Sharing – If the Timing Makes Sense
Once you understand your audience’s active times, continue sharing your blog posts and other social promotions immediately — if the timing makes sense. For example, if you’re up late at night writing and publishing blog posts, it may not make sense to tweet about them immediately upon publication if your audience is sound asleep. On the other hand, if the timing makes sense for your audience, an immediate update is nice and fresh. Make sure to be available to respond to any comments or questions that may come in.

Schedule Updates During Your Audience’s Active Time
Fortunately, you can schedule your tweets and status updates to appear at a designated time using third party tools and Facebook’s own scheduling tool. Since you know when your audience is most active, it makes sense to change your activities to match. If you can be available during these times as well, that’s even better. After all, “social” is the name of the game!

Set Up Follow-Up Posts
No matter how well timed your initial posts may be, a large portion of your audience won’t see them the first time. Setting up follow-up updates is a great way to touch base with your audience and keep people informed. Choose your most important posts and re-issue them a day or two later. For example, if you’re running a social media contest and want to get as many fans involved as possible, sending one contest announcement won’t reach as many people as a series of them. Be careful not to spam your followers’ news feeds with follow-ups.

A common technique for following up with fans is to preface the update with “In case you missed it… .” Another method is to provide an update. For example, you might say something along the lines of, “Our contest launched yesterday — have you entered yet?”

Get more mileage out your social media posts by posting immediately, when your audience is active, and periodically afterward.