No animal organization wants to come across as spammy. In fact, on some social networks such as Facebook, posting too frequently will work against you. But on Twitter, more is better, and so is repeating yourself.

Two years ago, Twitter gave accounts the ability to re-post — known on the platform as a re-Tweet, or RT — their own messages. The reason for this is that activity on nearly all Tweets happens in the first 15 minutes, and after that, few or none of your followers will see the Tweet.

The idea is to post that same message multiple times, at different times of day, to make sure as many of your followers as possible get a chance to see it.

It’s not necessary to literally RT your own Tweets. You can simply post them multiple times over a given period, manually or by using either a third party platform like Hootsuite or Buffer, or Twitter’s native scheduler.

What period should that be? It depends. For pets looking for homes or an emergency foster plea, obviously you’ll need to keep it to a day or two.

But for content from your site or a promotion for a future event, or a long-term fundraising appeal, repeating your Tweet over a two-week period is what Nonprofit Technology found optimal through their trial and error process. The essential thing is that you post the Tweets at different times of day; the whole point is to reach people you didn’t reach with earlier messages, and people tend to use Twitter at the same time of day, every day.

As to overall frequency, you might be surprised to learn that between 1 and 4 times per hour is optimal for getting people to click on your Tweets. It’s critical, however, that these not be just automated, truncated blog posts, adoption listings, or Facebook or Instagram posts. They need to be structured for Twitter itself, and that’s a strategy that may or may not be worth it for your organization.

A reasonable compromise is to use a scheduler and set up a number of Tweets each week, then schedule those Tweets to repeat at appropriate intervals at different times a day. It ups your Tweet count without significantly adding to the time needed to manage the channel, and ensures the content you do post gets seen and RT’d by as many of your followers and their followers as possible. Give it a try!