Some months have gone since I started this topic in this list, and still, we can't know how much engagement we have at Wikipedia, because data is not available. Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk, things are changing, there are more accounts in Mastodon daily, but still Twitter matters. I have been looking at the Twitter activity in the last days for @Wikipedia and I'm still very worried about the (lack of) strategy followed here. A full team, with staff members, which only produces one tweet per day, a lonely message in the vastness of the ocean, and gets really poor engagement numbers.

A couple of weeks ago Pelé, one of the greatest football players of all time, died. (English) Wikipedia Twitter account needed 7 days to tweet about it, even if the article was changed in a few minutes after the death (https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1611363972174778368). The tweet had 13.729 impressions (now we can know the number of impressions), 14 RTs and 129 likes. Wikipedia account has nearly 644.000 followers. If we divide these two numbers, we get a rate of 2,13% of impressions per follower.

The same day Pelé died, Basque Wikipedia made a tweet. Not a week after, just when it was news (https://twitter.com/euwikipedia/status/1608541274491211776). The tweet had 964 impressions, 3 RTs and 2 likes. Basque Wikipedia account has 7,956 followers. This is a rate of 12,11% of impressions per follower. x5.68 times larger, relatively than (English) Wikipedia Twitter account.

(English) Wikipedia Twitter account has nearly 81 times more followers than the Basque one. English Wikipedia is more visible, because it has a (now golden) verified account symbol, so tweets are more often promoted. English has 1.500 million speakers around the world. Basque has fewer than one million. English Wikipedia should have around 1.000 more followers than Basque Wikipedia. English Wikipedia article about Pelé had 2,5 million pageviews in the two days after his death. Basque had 250 pageviews. This is 10.000 times more pageviews.

@Wikipedia has 644.000 followers, and @euwikipedia has nearly 8.000. Audience of English Wikipedia is 10.000 times larger for the same event. Why Wikipedia is not 10.000 times larger? Why doesn't Wikipedia account have 80 million followers? YouTube's Twitter account has 78 million followers. "By 2030, Wikimedia is to become the central infrastructure for Free Knowledge on the Internet.". How could we if Youtube's account has 100x more followers than we have? How can think that we are in a good shape if our tweets are only seen by less than 2% of our followers?

Dear all,

Some weeks ago, we had a discussion here about the different approaches we have for the @wikipedia account at Twitter. We don't know yet how many interactions does the account has, but as I said in the discussion, we try to find ways to measure our work at @euwikipedia. Today I want to share with you that this account was ranked last week as the most influential social-movements account in Basque language (https://umap.eus/ranking/gizartea) and the 10^th most influential account in all categories (https://umap.eus/ranking/orokorra). This is a good metric we use to know if we are doing fine or not.

Sincerely,

Galder

From: Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, August 5, 2022 8:50 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: @Wikipedia losing opportunities in Twitter

On Mon, 18 Jul 2022 at 18:48, Lauren Dickinson <ldickinson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Also, Andy, we will follow up this week regarding your questions
> about the @WiktionaryUsers and @Wiktionary accounts.

Three working weeks have passed since the above was written; I've seen
no such follow-up. Have I missed something?

--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
https://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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