For quite a while I’ve been taking care of posting social media links on Facebook and Twitter for Magazine articles. I typically catch up on them a few times a week when I have time around other work. That time is getting ridiculously scarce nowadays. I realized today I’ve missed quite a few articles over the past month or so for that reason. It’s also not helpful to the Magazine community that I haven’t been passing on the knowledge on how to do it.
The requirements include the posting person needs to be a member of the Twitter “tweetdeck” team, and at least an author on the Facebook page for Fedora. They’re high-trust roles since these channels speak on behalf of the project. Furthermore, the person should know some basics about how to craft a call to action (CTA) around an article. It’s not difficult to learn but it is important.
Is there a more appropriate way to share and/or scale this work? Do we have other folks in Mindshare that are interested to pitch in?
Thanks Paul! I was wondering who the man behind the curtain was. Posting a link a few times a week doesn’t sound too difficult. I’m willing to give it a try. I guess just email me the directions if you would like me to do it.
Personally, I’d rather this not be a function of the editorial team. If we had a functioning social media team, I’d want them to own this. The if is doing a lot of work here, though. I know Mindshare has talked about this issue from time to time, but I’m not aware of any significant progress happening. Maybe it’s part of the Community Outreach Revamp, at least tangentially?
Ideally it could just be part of the WP instance doing its thing. Editors could enter the blurb the same way they enter an SEO summary now for Google. Then it can scale at the rate of growing editorship. The problem is, as far as I know, i.e. not far, that works on WordPress through Jetpack’s “publish” feature – which is keyed to an individual person’s WP.com account. That’s no good for a community function.
If there’s a revamp happening for outreach, this seems like a no-brainer to cover there. I’ve measured social media impact on Magazine articles in the past and it’s quite literally 50-100% more eyeballs when there’s a story posted on social media for an article. IIRC referrals typically show substantial hits coming from them as well. (Seems to always be much smaller than Google search for reasons I don’t understand, so I’m talking about pageviews.)
If someone desires to do this, I’ll pass instructions on list or in the docs site. We should be default to open, not doing business via email when others can learn from it too. But first things first, I’d prefer to know how the various teams want to handle.
Posting a link a few times a week doesn’t sound too difficult. I’m willing to give it a try. I guess just email me the directions if you would like me to do it.