Over the past five of years of really diving into social media, I’ve learned a lot of technique to really increase followers and drive traffic. We all know that you have to create good content to attract people to your website or blog. Driving people to your site is also a common goal and social media is playing a bigger part in that these days.

Organizations that use social media effectively see about 30% of their total web traffic come from social media efforts. For sites that don’t rank well in search engines, social media traffic can be as high as 50-75% of all traffic.

Most big social media consultants show that it is best to post Tweets and FB posts between 20-30 times a day.  That seems really hard to accomplish.  I usually manage to get out about 7 on a day when I don’t have any new blogs, but around 15 on a day when I do.

Why so often?

Three reasons you should post to social media often.

1. Your followers are not in the same timezone.  One of the things I learned quickly when blogging is that people around the world can read the blog.  Australia may be reading this blog at noon, but its 3 in the morning here. The West coast isn’t even awake if you only Tweet your new blog post first thing in the morning on the East coast. Those Tweets just become buried.
2. Rise out of the noise. Odds are your followers follow a lot of other people. Unless they have you on their watch lists, they may never see your post because it is pushed down by other Tweets.
3. Repetition is a staple of education. Just because someone spots your post, it doesn’t mean they have the time to pay attention to it then or even follow what you are trying to say. Repetition can help that.

You can post many times across the course of the day, even at 3:00 am and not actually be at your computer.  Both Bufferapp.com and Tweetdeck.com can help you schedule your Tweets and Facebook posts. A great thing is they are both free. So you can schedule multiple tweets across the course of the day when you finish writing that new blog entry.

So what are some good practices for scheduling Twitter and Facebook posts?

1. Post at the best times possible.  You want to post when your visitors are getting into work, just before they get back from lunch and when they go home. These seem to be when people check their personal boards the most.
2. Post for international audience. There are a lot of English speaking nations in the world. You can drive traffic from almost any point in the globe. Target countries like the UK and Australia if your site is only in English.
3. Test post at weird times.  Most people know to post at the best times, so try weird times as well to see if it drives new traffic. Keep playing around with posting times to determine when the best times are for your audience.
4. Post at least 4 times on the same topic.  If you have a number of international followers, you should increase this number to match their time zones.
5. Change the wording of your post each time. Nobody wants to see the same post over and over. You also need to find wording that works well for your audience that drives them to click through. This is a good opportunity to test different tones, calls to action and phrasing to drive traffic.