Telugu Wikimedia Social Media Strategies and Guidelines

Social Media is playing important role in connecting people and organizations. Social Media became a platform to engage with people, tell stories, get support for the cause and other kinds of Non-profit organizations & movements' activities. In this regard, Telugu Wikipedia does have Social Media presences from years. Recently, Telugu Wikipedians created guidelines & collated strategies that are expected to be followed in Social Media handles & accounts of Telugu Wikimedia Projects.

Background

Telugu Wikipedia does have Facebook pages & Twitter handle way back from 2011-13. There were a handful of pages created by Telugu Wikipedians who are active on Facebook and one of these pages was curated by several Wikipedians and does have more than 7 thousand followers by October 2017. Telugu Wikipedians like User:Pranayraj1985 handled the facebook account by creating several posts using Telugu Wikipedia content. They basically tried to improve readership and promote quality of Telugu Wikipedia. Some of the issues raised off-wiki regarding what is acceptable and what should be the strategy of these pages.

Discussion

On 1 September 2017, User:Pavan santhosh.s suggested a set of strategies & guidelines that can be taken into consideration for Social Media Policy of Telugu Wikimedia Projects and can be discussed further. These suggestions included defining objectives, Guidelines (with dos and don'ts) and strategies for Social Media Policy. Ravichandra supported the idea and suggested another objective (showcasing best quality works of Wikipedia). Viswanadh added some strategies (Writing series of posts about Technical aspects that helps Wikipedians), User:Pranayraj1985 suggested some don'ts in handling Wikipedia pages & handles, User:Rajasekhar1961 expanded the strategy to other sister projects (Telugu Wikisource, Wiktionary) and finally User:Chaduvari suggested not to name any page as official to avoid possible conflicts. Swaralasika announced consensus and finally User:Pavan santhosh.s created a page basing on the discussion.