On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Joe Sutherland
<jsutherland(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Tilman,
On 6 August 2015 at 23:18, Tilman Bayer <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> 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
but more
focussed on the general public.
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB