On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Joe Sutherland <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Tilman, > > On 6 August 2015 at 23:18, Tilman Bayer <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> To refresh memories (or maybe James wasn't around back then), we >> actually did this kind of SM pretty intensively for about half a year >> in 2013/14 - including DYKs (mostly custom-crafted by the SM team), >> but also with "On this Day", Wiktionary words of the day and such. See >> e.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media/Calendar/2014/01 , >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media/Calendar/2014/02 and >> surrounding months. >> >> I don't recall a rule that the social media channels could only be >> used for blog posts. What's true though - and that was also a major >> factor why that experiment ended: Those custom-crafted SM messages >> about project content required significant effort to draft and review >> (even so, we sometimes got called out by followers or community >> members for inaccuracies, typos etc. that slipped through). And on the >> other hand, the aim to send them out daily often distracted from the >> SM promotion of blog posts, which often was lagging for several days >> during that time or dropped altogether, when we also had less capacity >> overall. >> >> So I think Joe's first point is spot on, about saving work by reusing >> the already carefully crafted and reviewed hooks by the ENWP DYK >> community. It's something I encouraged a few times myself back then >> (also regarding On This Day), but it wasn't practiced consistently. >> >> Another point we should be aware of is that unlike many other websites >> that practice this kind of thing on their SM channels, we can't >> realistically hope to significantly increase the overall readership of >> Wikipedia through DYK tweets. I'm looking forward to an evaluation of >> this new experiment (I know that the SM team has made huge strides >> this year in systematically measuring its impact). But keep in mind >> that our projects get about half a billion - 500 million - pageviews >> per day. So even if we have a outrageously successful DYK tweet or FB >> message that goes viral and achieves, say, 10,000 clicks (back then >> the best numbers I seem to recall were in the hundreds), that would >> still be a minuscule increase of 0.002% that day. There may be other >> benefits, such as gaining followers, but it would be good to try and >> quantify them too. > > > This is still true today, but using that logic we should only ever > tweet/post about the blog ;) Our social platforms are strong but achieve > really quite awful engagement at the moment (almost 5 million Facebook > likes, yet only something like 50,000 impressions on average). Working on > increasing the posting quantity and quality should improve that.
Good observation about engagement metrics, but I think that's a separate issue. Not all clicks are equal in terms of impact - it could mean someone who is enticed by one of our tweets to read a blog post that changes their thinking about Wikipedia and its community, or someone who has already seen 2000 Wikipedia articles in their life and now sees the 2001st. Which is the more worthwhile outcome? And it doesn't need to be blog posts; there's a lot of other content (also from elsewhere in the movement) that we can link to and often already do. Just to give another example: we could do much more in terms of posting practical information and insights about Wikipedia for readers (*puts Reading team hat on*), much like the former https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tip_of_the_day but more focussed on the general public. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Social-media mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/social-media
