Learning patterns/Social media

Learning Pattern Library

Social Media

problemYou run a social media account, but how do you maximize its effectiveness?

solutionPick the good topic at the prefect time to targeted people.

creator• AddisWang

created on5 January, 2014

status:in progress

What problem does this solve?

Many Wikipedia communities have their own social media account that is run by volunteers. But most of them don't really achieve the result that social media can provide. Especially for Twitter- or Facebook-based accounts, people often tend to follow the official account run by the Wikimedia Foundation rather than your accounts. But this doesn't mean you should give up! We can put lots of energy into volunteer-run accounts to achieve our goals.

What is the solution?

1. Who is your target audience?

   HINT: The defect of official account on Twitter or Facebook is that they are too official.

   DESCRIPTION: Social media have too fundamental idea: social and media. Because they are official account, they majorly emphasize on media part. But most people using social media for "social" part. People use their fragmentary time to check social media for something interesting and funny, which is also easy to share with friends, rather than serious news or boring short sentence of "On This Day".

   SOLUTION: Be aware that "unofficial community social media account" can do something under the big influence of "official account", by only make sure what kind of people you would like to targeted as the readers of those posts, and decide what user behavior you want happened when people see you post(Of course is Retweet or Comment). If you can not be the first in one field, create a new one and be the first.

2. What are some good topics can generate big effect?

   HINT: Start from small group of people, and using your own interest.

   DESCRIPTION: If just simply post news of Wikimedia projects or some articles from "featured article", "On this day" or featured picture, why people want to follow your account to get the information they can achieve from the "official account". If just simply post the abstract of random articles, people may not even take a look of your post.

   SOLUTION: People sharing interesting post not only because the post is interesting, but also they think the post is interesting. And who knows what are certain interesting things in certain group? The people who has the same interest. By posting these funny things in certain field, you can increase the influence of the account in one group of people. And we know everyone has more than one hobby, so as you.

3. When is good time?

   HINT: Use your own experience

   DESCRIPTION: Everyone has limit time to contribute to social media program, and too much posts are just annoying. So it's important to post limited posts at good time, to both get more attention and avoid boredom.

   SOLUTION: People in different region has different time for activeness, there is no prefect time for all over the world. But you can use your own experience, when you checking social media? when you friends checking social media? when your target audience checking social media? Try to make a simple analysis to find out the best time works for you. In our Chinese project, we posting content everyday at 8AM (commuting time), 12PM (lunch break), 5PM-12 AM.

When to use

Shared Knowledge - Macedonia

"Our fan page on Facebook was created [in 2010], at the time of celebrating the 10-years anniversary of Wikipedia. The number of page likes followed a growth trend of about 5,000 likes in the first two years and 20,000 new likes in 2013. We strongly believe that one of the main reasons for our success is the activity of the page administrators in regularly posting new content, mostly associated with events on the current date, that attracts the fans to contribute by commenting and sharing the posted content. The process of sharing can be seen as another driver for increasing the number of page lakes, as it allows the friends of our fans to become new fans of the page. Images from Wiki Loves Cultural Heritage 2013 were also posted during and quickly after the competition. Importantly, the promotion of articles from the Macedonian Wikipedia on our fan page on Facebook has significantly increased the number of page views in the days they were posted. The third factor for this success might be the fact that the link to the fan page has prevailed in the sitenotice template on the Macedonian Wikipedia all the time, allowing our readers to have a better access to it. Our target group consists primarily of native speakers of Macedonian, although it's evident that we have fans from other countries as well."

• We relied heavily on Social Media to promote our 2015 Wiki Loves Monuments contest in Ireland. Throughout the contest period we tweeted pictures that had been uploaded to encourage our followers to try to do better. We tweeted 3-4 images per day at several times duting each day. It was a little bit of work initially, creating and scheduling the tweets, but we did see an increase in interaction and several people commented on it at our awards ceremony. Using a twitter scheduler like Twuffer or Buffer made the scheduling much easier. Sameichel (talk) 09:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

• With the help of Vojtěch Dostál (of WMCZ), we created a Facebook page for the Commons app and have posted various version updates/changelogs, upload statistics, and pictures uploaded via the app in it. The response has been encouraging and seeing other pictures uploaded via the app seems to motivate users, although we are still somewhat new and hope to increase our number of followers in the future. Misaochan (talk) 10:44, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Endorsements

• AddisWang
• Sameichel (talk) 09:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
• Misaochan (talk) 10:40, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

See also

Related patterns

• Grants:Learning patterns/Tracking an online campaign