Learning patterns/Use social media for promotion

Learning Pattern Library

Use social media to promote an event and build community.

problemI want to promote an event to new audiences.

solutionUse social media to reach potential new editors, and to build community.

creator• KHarold (WMF)

status:in progress

What problem does this solve?

You want to reach new audiences to promote an event or contest.

What is the solution?

Use social media for promotion:

• Tweet or post information about your event on pages or accounts of 'audience leaders' or to people or organizations who may benefit from increased coverage on Wikipedia.
• Use hashtags that are popular with people who might be interested in your event topic.
• “With social media, we experiment with new ideas during events where we know there will be lots of attention.”

Use social media to build community:

• Thank editors for contributing content on social media.
• Create Facebook groups for event or program participants to ask questions or share information.

Share YOUR social media tips.

Examples

• “If want to reach wider audience outside of Wikimedia, schedule tweets, 1 week and 1-2 days before a contest. We use a template for this.”
• "We try to match our communication to the audience we want to reach, but reach out beyond traditional user groups and it really works for us. We send tweets to partners or groups who will benefit, for example, we tweeted information about the comic contest to top authors at the conference in order to reach their fans, who might join the contest.”
• “We also use hashtags that are popular, so that we can reach new audiences."
• "We reach new communities by contacting new audience leaders, for example, sending a press release about a week before a contest to organizations who have a large following of people who might be interested in the topic."
• "We have experimented with Vine. For contests, we record faces of the writers, or the Wikipedia pages that need to be expanded. See an example here."
• "After a lot of research we learned that people were not proud of being a Wikipedian. It was something private, mumbles, iamawikipedian.... A couple of years ago we started talking about editing WP on our social media handles and people became more proud of sharing the things they edit on social media, and their friends reply thanking them for editing."
• “During the contest we use social media to send thank-you tweets to top contributors to encourage early participation. This gets re-tweeted and can go 'viral' in our small community. We publicly thank a lot to our top users.”

Endorsements

• I shall attempt to share my experiences and considerations in working with Facebook to inform audiences, gain readership, editorship and offer our Incubator as a platform for new ideas from the public. B. Jankuloski (talk) 21:46, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
• Endorsed, and Bjankuloski, please do. Ping me and I'll take a look after you've done so? Tony (talk) 08:39, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
• We found social media a very useful tool to promote events and create general awareness. Humetheresa (talk) 09:10, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
• We used social media – twitter, instagram and Facebook – very effectively in our WikiD: women, WIkipedia, design campaign. This helped us to promote awareness of the issue of the under-representation of women architects, and to raise interest in our project and writing workshops/editathons. We also used social media effectively to document progress made and increase recognition of women in architecture Smdgejc (talk) 00:30, 31 January 2016 (UTC)