Following up from my latest comment in the Social Media efforts, we decided to create a dedicated thread for the Instagram efforts, as that one will take a lot of planning on what’ll change and how it’ll change.
From our latest (as of now) meeting, we need to:
update the profile picture
decide on how we’ll organize the stories’ highlights
create the highlights’ cover arts after deciding on them
do some marketing research on competing OSs’ profiles
organize post and story ideas to revamp the profile’s interaction
interact with the Design team for feedback and ideas for the design of the whole profile
finish setting our GitLab for organizing our posting schedule
These ones aren’t set in stone yet, but the design language is there. Another idea we discussed is for their color palette, if they’d all use either Fedora Blue as a background color or cycle between the Fedora color palette secondary colors. Here are mockups for both of those cases (the second one is a last second idea, so it’s pretty poorly made as it is right now):
After a lot of help from @duffy, a lot more progress has been done. We have some progress on categorizing our current highlights and a first draft on how they will be organized. As of now, we’re tending to go with her idea:
Events (including flock, hatch, etc. just put them all in one)
Features (features and apps in Fedora / howto tutorials)
News (eg comm blog posts)
Join (ideas on how to contribute)
Community (interviews with community members, community-submitted content)
I’ve personally updated the HackMD we currently use to organize our schedule and ideas with a bunch of stuff (post/story ideas are more than welcome), and started using Penpot to help make our designs public and get help from the Design team.
I have never used Penpot before, so I’m still having a bit of a learning curve, but I managed to create a working mockup for our Instagram profile to test the picture and highlights’ designs:
You can also see the current implementation on the highlights’ designs. The “News” and “Community” ones are pretty much set in stone in their design (once again, thanks to Máirín), while the other ones are being worked on. As for the colors, we decided to go with light blue on white for the profile picture and reverse it (white on light blue) for the highlights, to keep a consistent color palette for it, and use the secondary colors for the posts/stories themselves.
@steiner Ooh I like how the pennant flag came out - is that from clipart or did you draw it?
The only thing is we can’t take the F out of the bubble - can we work the flag to be a bit thicker to accomodate the full Fedora logomark?
We should swap in the 4F’s features mark for features.
For join, I had an idea… we’ve been using an “open door” icon for contextual “how to become a contributor” tooltips in the wwwfpo revamp project… I wonder if an “open door” would be a good concept for this one? (I also have a todo to grab the heart/handshake art from the red hat set for this.)
These mockups to slot in and test out the overall profile look & feel across light/dark and platforms is such a great idea, I love it!
I drew it myself based on clipart, changed just a couple of things to better fit the logo in.
I don’t think so, it already took some work to make sure the F fit and was legible. Maybe we should look for another way to represent it?
I love that idea, but I’m not sure how it would read for someone that isn’t accustomed with the 4Fs’ shape, since we are only using symbolic icons in the highlights.
We could try, depending on how we deploy it it can look good.
I drew it myself based on clipart, changed just a couple of things to better fit the logo in.
Oh ok, fabulous!
I don’t think so, it already took some work to make sure the F fit and was legible. Maybe we should look for another way to represent it?
To be honest, I’m looking at it sans logo in the mockups now and it looks perfectly fine without the logo. Let’s just go with that!
I love that idea, but I’m not sure how it would read for someone that isn’t accustomed with the 4Fs’ shape, since we are only using symbolic icons in the highlights.
It’s two gears instead of 3… I don’t understand the concern here?
Here is the open door mark we’ve been using from fontawesome:
Here are some red hat ones I found that we can adapt if needed:
cross-collab:
community:
collaboration:
I cannot for the life of me find the hand/heart icon from the set though
Well, since the work on the profile’s visual revamp is done, we decided to share the results for feedback here. Here’s the final profile picture for the profile:
I’ve mentioned it in our last marketing meeting, so here’s the complete write-up.
I have a big plan for improving the Fedora Project’s Instagram profile that involves many moving parts. It may or may not be possible to change one or many of those things, so I’ll need feedback on most of these points. Let’s start with an index of the changes and I’ll explain them one by one:
Changing the profile’s bio;
Creating introductory posts about the project and pinning them to the profile;
Defining what profiles we should follow;
Dedicating budget to invest in contracting SproutSocial for our profile.
1. Changing the profile’s bio
I’ll start with this one since I’m not sure if it is something that can be done by us.
In my personal opinion and in my small empirical research between people from my uni and some friends and family (I’d love to do a proper, large scale research, but I don’t have the time or the funds for it), all of them that have never heard about Fedora before, the current bio doesn’t say a lot about what the Project really is, like, what we really do and provide.
What I know is that our Facebook profile has two About Us sections, one with a similar but more detailed description (which also better details RedHat’s relation with the project), but other with a much clearer explanation of what Fedora (as in the distro, not the project) is.
Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project.
So I came up with a couple of questions:
Can we actually change anything about the bio itself?
If it is something we need to keep as is (for legal purposes, for example), that’s not a big deal
If we can change it, do we HAVE to mention RedHat’s sponsorship in the bio itself?
Since the bio is limited to only 150 characters, it would free up space to point more relevant information about what we do. If it is not an issue I suggest a change to include the RedHat sponsorship in more detail one of the pinned posts (that I’ll explain in detail in point 2), instead.
If both of these things aren’t an issue, I have built the following bio that I’d like to suggest:
The official feed for the Fedora Project, a #FreeSoftware community that develops #FedoraLinux, a leading edge, stable and secure OS based on #Linux.
Having it like this would accomplish the following:
Better detail what we do, making clear that we develop a Linux distribution without the need for an average person to understand what a Linux distro is.
Update our hashtags to more relevant ones, since:
#fedoraproject is barely used on Instagram, where #fedoralinux is much more common;
community is widely used, but not much when it comes to FOSS, we’d be a small fish in an ocean when it comes to relevance;
#linux is heavily used and while ideally I’d go with #opensource instead of #freesoftware when it comes to relevance, both are good in terms of usage and the latter fit better within the character limit of the bio.
Avoid confusion in our relation with RedHat, since the way it currently looks makes it seem like “we’re a small project that is part of the much larger RedHat” (words from one of the interviewees).
2. Creating introductory posts about the project and pinning them to the profile
A relatively new Instagram feature is the ability to pin posts to the top of the profile’s feed. We can use that to create up to three posts that will always stay on the top of the feed, and I suggest using that to create three introductory posts for those that never heard of Fedora before or those that just don’t know a lot about it.
My concept separates these into three topics, from left to right, all of them being carousel posts (posts with many images):
What the project is
This post would go into detail on our philosophy, the differences between the Fedora Project as a whole and Fedora Linux the distro and our relation with RedHat.
What “products” we offer
This one would show off the many editions (both official, emerging and spins) of our OS in a simple way.
A quick and simple install guide
This one is really underrated. Although most of our followers are already quite accustomed with Linux and surely knows how to install LFS with their eyes closed (/s), having a simple install guide would:
Promote Fedora Media Writer;
Teach less tech literate users both on how to flash a USB drive and how to reach their BIOS (which is usually the hardest part in the process);
Have all of that information laid out in a simple way and in a familiar place, instead of having to hunt for an install guide, again, for less tech literate users.
Potentially be a way to teach all users how to use the new Anaconda whenever it comes out. Having a version for current Anaconda is ideal until it actually gets updated though.
3. Defining what profiles we should follow
This one is a minor gripe, I admit, so it’s not that important.
One thing we can use our profile for is following other FOSS related projects as a way to promote them, so when people check what accounts we follow they get actual recommendations on FOSS projects, while what we currently have is a mix of contributors, FOSS related stuff and some seemingly random profiles.
4. Dedicating budget to invest in contracting SproutSocial for our profile
Ok, ending up big. This one is the most important and high risk high reward decisions we can take for our profile (specially since this would affect our workflow for all social media, not only for Instagram), so this is the part that needs feedback the most, specially from the Mindshare team, since we’d need the budget for implementing this.
SproutSocial is a paid social media management platform that would allow us many, many things for our social media, the most important for us being:
Having SproutLink (using RedHat’s as an example of how it works) for our profile’s link, which would allow us to have links for all of our posts without obsolescence (AKA that “link in the bio” that isn’t there anymore because there’s already a newer post that took the bio’s link);
Have a unified platform to organize, schedule and post to all social media;
Analytics on our posts metrics for more than the 30 days Instagram offers;
The main problem is in the fact that it is paid, more precisely US$89/month (for the yearly plan, $99 for the monthly one). So we’d need a couple of things to implement that:
The budget, obviously;
The people to handle both the platform and the posts themselves (since the marketing team is quite small currently);
We could use LinkTree instead as a compromise for our links, which is a free (in cost) alternative, but which is way more limited in comparison. If we were to use it it’d be better to use it to aggregate the most essential links (getfedora.org, Docs, Magazine, Ask & Discussion, for example), and we’d get back to the issue we have of having to depend on our stories for sharing links to more specific things, like mailing list announcements, specific Magazine posts related to the feed posts, etc.
In the end I would still consider Sprout at least as a future social media management plan.
All of this looks great to me! Here a few small notes from me.
I’ve come across hesitancy from the community to refer to Fedora as a product. As long as we use another term to refer to the actual output that is the OS, we’re good.
I agree that it would be great to use our social media as a way to point to other cool projects that someone may want to check out. It could also be worthwhile to clean up our follows and have a guide on what kind of profiles we should be following.
In my opinion, we can start by following other major distros and the FOSS projects that make up Fedora like Gnome and KDE. Maybe we can also follow projects that enable the community to work like Matrix and Discourse.
What other kinds of profiles should we follow?
If we can get this, I think it’s great, but I think what we may have to do first is prove ourselves for a certain amount of time. The Marketing Team has been relatively inactive for so long with relatively little output, so I understand the potential hesitancy from Mindshare to drop $89 to $99 a month on our team.
For me, I think a good compromise would be for us to have this software as a goal. We can prove ourselves first with consistent posting over a period of time and that will help the Mindshare Committee feel more comfortable with making this investment. Assuming this amount is even in the cards.
Yeah, I’m aware that it’s an unpopular term, I don’t mean it in a corporate sense and more in a “hey, here’s what we have to offer” kind of sense, not sure if I’m clear about it though.
I just created a HackMD for us to start organizing it. We don’t have necessarily a limit though, so we can follow any account that we feel it’s worth recommending.
I’m not sure about following other distros’ profiles though. I started this revamping effort precisely because I noticed almost all distros lacked a proper social media presence, specially on Instagram (which kind of makes sense, considering we tend to prefer FOSS). I believe we should only do it for the ones that have an active profile.
Same thing for staff. Not everyone feels comfortable with having their personal profile out there, so I thing maybe we could have some kind of contact with the ones that we’d follow in some way? In a “if you want us to follow your profile, you can post your @ here”, but only for contributors?
Yeah, after giving it a bit of thought that’s the conclusion I came to, which is why I’m presenting LinkTree as a middle ground to at least have some form of link aggregation. We could start for that while having it as an objective for the future.
