Balancing different social channels and methods of promotion can keep a high-investment resource or marketing event relevant for a long time.

There’s no blueprint for social media marketing, and that’s especially true when it comes to getting the timing right. A new study by ShareThis indicates that brands need to think carefully about how they time content publication relative to different social channels.

The ShareThis quarterly report found that during the first two to three days after a major event, Twitter sees three times as many shares as normal. However, when you step back and look at the three-week period after an event, Facebook takes the lead with 85 percent of all social shares.

What’s the takeaway? Twitter is where news breaks quickly and initially spreads, but the in-depth discourse surrounding an event, promotion or campaign lives on Facebook. This is valuable advice for brands trying to figure out how to promote a recent content investment or company event – like publishing an infographic.

Setting the stage for infographic success

An infographic isn’t just a powerful marketing tool – it’s often the culmination of weeks or months of work, and it represents much of a brand’s messaging synthesized into a single resource. Promoting it on social media is an important step in getting it front of prospects and customers.

A Brafton client that sells fundraising software was in just this position. It had created an infographic describing the state of its industry and wanted to make sure that it received sustained and consistent traffic. By starting with an announcement on Twitter and following the initial publication with blog posts and news articles promoted on Facebook, the infographic kept getting traffic. In fact, the company saw hundreds of leads just as a result of the infographic, many of them directly tied to social and email promotion.

Every channel is a tool in the shed, and each serves its own purpose. Email builds an audience, search drives leads and raise thought leadership and social increases visibility. But within the sub-category of social media marketing, different networks fulfill different tasks at different times, and balancing them to maximum effect means promotion can continue undisturbed long after an event or promotion seems like old news.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.