Friday morning I saw a tweet https://twitter.com/wxbrad/status/657533140756504576 from a TV meteorologist exclaiming at the speed of edits to the Hurricane Patricia article page on Wikipedia. That struck me, and we tweeted about the updates several times as #Patricia went viral, including this tweet https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/657620646843707393 containing a public domain GIF of the storm on satellite.
The GIF tweet was #1 in media views, #3 in gaining new followers for our account, and #5 in engagements over the past 12 months. (Fear not: I am *very* conservative about tweeting GIFs. Thank you, Michael, for encouraging the experiment.)
Our Patricia tweets are roughly corollated to spikes on the article's page views, but that's not due to a surge of clickthroughs. I'd like to think it helped. (See attached.) The page went from nothing to 100K views in 24 hours, as James noted https://twitter.com/jamesofur/status/657807415203729409 on Twitter. We hopped on the page's back for a ride, not the other way around.
But we got in that viral conversation, helped to demonstrate that news unfolds on Wikipedia, and underscored our real-time relevance. (We're not just waiting here for you to look weird stuff up.)
The Twitter bot @wikipediatrends https://twitter.com/WikipediaTrends tweets page view spikes. I've subscribed to notifications so we can continue to be opportunistic. Zack mentioned perhaps becoming a stock tile or recommended account in Twitter Moments or another social media starter kit for media. I'm working on it. I'm also beginning to look into Snapchat possibilities.
Welcome any suggestions of real-time conversations to jump into, or ways to do it better.
Thanks much,
Jeff Elder Digital communications manager Wikimedia Foundation 704-650-4130 @jeffelder https://twitter.com/JeffElder @wikipedia https://twitter.com/wikipedia The Wikimedia blog https://blog.wikimedia.org/
