Journalism is a full time job, you’re always thinking, creating, publishing and sharing your articles. Even in your free time, if something interesting comes to your mind, you’ll try to remember it and make use of it next time you start writing. You’re investing so much time in it, that it would be unfair if you couldn’t share it properly.
Using the Social Networks to share your work can be a bit tricky, there are a lot of people out there, but they’re not always responsive. This is because you have to find the right time and place to share your work. If you discover the secret of the universe, but you share it in your local bar, you’ll be seen as a drunk and no one will take you seriously and if you go to a conference room when no one is inside, no one will listen to you. The same thing happens in social networks; you have to find the right time when your target people is available to read and share what you submit there.
There are a lot of studies about it, but the only way to know what fits you best is to try. There are a few tips that will help you to be successful in various situations, specific for social networks:
Facebook: Facebook has a lot of people, and most people look at their account in the morning or on their mobile devices at work or when they get back to work at night. Posting in the morning will help you get better attention from those people. In general, people spend on Facebook more time during the week.
Twitter: Twitter itself is a bit tricky, you don’t put your articles on Twitter, you put the link to it and very little information, you have to choose carefully the words to attract people attention, and always help to ask for a retweet, a lot of people forget to retweet even if the article is good, so a little reminder always helps. Twitter has more visits in the morning too, but unlike Facebook, it finds its traffic increased during weekends.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a social network focused on work, you’ll find more traffic on it before the working hours, and the days with most traffic tend to be Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Pinterest: Particularly different to the other social networks, Pinterest finds more traffic on Saturday mornings. Even if it’s a “smaller”, or more specific social network, visits on the site are usually longer than in other ones, so most people in this one tend to focus more on it.
Your blog: Last but not least, if you are a journalist, you should definitely have a blog; this is the place where you post, share your links and create your own bounds through social networks. If you know your public, you’ll know when they will be more able to read your articles. But be constant in your publications in order to make it accessible to your public at the same time.
All things said, you can keep in mind those tips, and create your work on the day that suits bests your blog and then share it at the time it suits best to specific social networks.