Can you hear me now? Am I coming through loud and clear? How do I sound?

Sometimes in order to truly and effectively reach your audience, you need to repeat the same message several times in your social network posts. Typically the people you’re trying to reach read things at different times of the day/week depending on when they spend time online browsing the networks they belong to. Given the large number of messages people are increasingly exposed to, if you have something important to share then you’re probably going to need to say it at least a couple times to ensure your message reaches everyone.

On the other hand, if you just say the same exact thing over and over again and don’t find different angles and approaches for getting your point across, you run the risk of turning off your audience.

There is certainly value in taking an approach similar to @guykawasaki on Twitter. He is a user noted for tweeting the same message multiple times. For instance, he recently posted about 10 toxic foods we love to eat and repeated the same message several times throughout the day. The benefit is that if you aren’t online the first time something is posted, you are still able to join the conversation when he posts about it again a few hours later. He has more than 200,000 followers, so his approach certainly hasn’t turned away a significant audience.

Guy has one way of doing it, but I prefer to take a different approach with my projects. While it’s important to get the main message across—and for businesses, I recognize that it’s going to be a similar message each time—I try to say things a little differently each time, ideally highlighting different parts of the overall message in the process.

When I’m working on messaging for my projects, I think about conversations I have with friends and family. I’m sure everyone who knows me can relate to me talking a few times about a favorite adventure. And I’m sure there are a few folks who’ve heard my same stories before. But there are times when my group of friends consist of people who have heard the story before and some who haven’t. I try to find a way to not bore my friends to death who have heard that particular story, while also inviting the new folks into the conversation. I like to keep my friends coming back for more, and I take the same approach with my social media communications.

Our Villageous project @CenPho on Twitter offers a few examples of how to say the same thing differently each time. To get users to a particular online location at a certain time for a contest, we repeated the same message a few times throughout the day but took a different approach with each message to keep things interesting and build excitement. Here are the messages we posted:

• You have 5 minutes to get to the intersection at Central/Thomas for a surprise! Tweet us a photo & you’ll win a prize!
• Only 45 minutes until the surprise at Central/Thomas…Snap a photo & we’ll give you a fab CenPho prize!
• Live or work near Central/Thomas? Get there by 4pm this afternoon for a fun surprise! Take a photo & tweet it to us & we’ll give u a prize!

This approach allowed us to create a dialog that gave people a reason to keep listening to what we have to say, while allowing us to repeat the message to reach different people in the @CenPho audience.

So how do you repeat yourself without repeating yourself?