Just to clarify from a historical perspective, the team has used scheduled messages both on Facebook and Twitter for quite some time already, as can be seen http://search.gmane.org/?query=schedule%3F&author=&group=gmane.org.wikimedia.socialmedia in the archives of this list. (Here https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170322 are instructions on how to do it in Tweetdeck, which I think work for any account.) That said, Samir makes good points about doing this more often. Just for fun and out of curiosity, I made a very quick and dirty chart showing the @wikipedia posting frequency per day for the last three months (the longest timespan Twitter will let you download in one go), enclosed below. It largely confirms Samir's observation. Personally I am generally wary about signal-to-noise ratios getting too low, but IMHO it would be good to schedule double-down tweets (repeat of the same tweet or a similar version) for blog posts more often, in case the first one went out at a time where most of Europe and Asia is asleep. I'll also note that there is a lot of superstition and dubious "research" out there by self-declared social media gurus telling you that your startup will fade into oblivion if you don't post your tweet exactly when the thrush knocks in the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day. The fact is, busy waking hours are also the hours where there is much more competition in people's timelines from other quality content. That said, there do seem to be a lot of Twitter users who don't scroll very far back in their timelines and thus are likely to miss tweets entirely if they were posted, say, 8h before they went online.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:26 PM, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks Samir!
Obvious caveat that, like you, I'm not a member of the comms team so nothing i say matters in an official decision sense but I'd certainly be interested to see what others think (and I'm sure they would) :). It's also possible that some of the longer term decisions would have to be made by the Digital Communications (including SM) Manager when they get hired (but that doesn't mean we can't have something interim).
I'm generally against any specific "every X hours" type posting scheme. I think it hurts the posts themselves because they never get out at very good, targeted, times and instead just sorta 'get out when they get out'. That said I AM very much for trying to get posts out at a time that makes sense for maximum attention for the article. That means we should get better about posting things at good times for the region that the article is about too. If it's about work in India, it should go out at prime time for them (I know in the US this is generally 8/9am and I assume it is there but don't know that for certain) etc.
I should clarify that I would actually challenge the ida that the majority of posts here get sent out right after approval. From complete memory (haven't actually checked my email) I think that that Joe, Michael, Ed etc have all been pretty good at trying to spread them out (including at different times for posts focused on different regions) and trying to get them up at a prime time (whether spreading out or prime time is more important is... something I honestly don't have a whole lot of an opinion on atm..). So, while we can always do better, I do think it's important to point out that imo the appropriate "goals" are already known and people try to address them where it makes sense.
I also think that, if we're posting cross platform, we should post the message on every platform at around the same time which makes using Facebook timed messages tough unless it's a FB only post (which we certainly have sometimes, especially for country/language targeted posts). Because of that I'd personally lean towards something like buffer https://buffer.com/ (which I think I heard about from Joe and/or JamesF) which is pretty cheap and would let you schedule all of the posts at once (FB/Twitter/G+) rather then platform specific tools.
I do think it could be really useful, however, to try targeting some for prime time in other areas of the world. Especially if the post has a connection but even if it is more general we may want to try it since I know there are a large number of people (at least in our facebook likes) outside of the US :) For example the US is the #2 country at around 280k likes but India is #1 at over 5x that. (and Bangladesh is #3) the same holds for our engagement and our participation on Facebook. Also, while Egypt may be "only" #6 in the country list Cairo itself is #3 (Dhaka is #1).
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Samir Elsharbaty < selsharbaty@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello everyone,
We all know that facebook posts on Wikipedia page get published usually right after getting approved by a second pair of eyes on this list. Most of posts are published during the working hours (9am - 5pm SF time 士2-3 hours) during the week (Monday-Friday). It makes sense for people to work during the normal working hours only but we are a global movement and these times are not necessarily the best for all time zones. For example I live in Egypt, and posts usually appear on my FB homepage around (6pm-3am). Also, sometimes we get 3-4 posts published in one hour while other times it's much longer between two posts.
In my modest POV, this has a simple solution which is using scheduled posts on FB https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635. This way we can agree on a frequency of posts (e.g. one post/6 hours), and when someone has an approved post it gets scheduled for publication 6 hours after the last post in the queue instead of getting it published immediately. This way we will be in better communication with the whole world and every post will have some time to be read before another one comes. One exception to this could be breaking news and important announcements that need to be published right away.
The same feature is available on Twitter https://business.twitter.com/help/scheduled-tweets BTW but I think it is only available for sponsored campaigns.
I hope that helps and please let me know if anyone has any thoughts.
Thank you!
-- Samir Elsharbaty, Wikipedia Education Program Wikimedia Foundation +2.011.200.696.77 education.wikimedia.org
Social-media mailing list Social-media@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/social-media
Social-media mailing list Social-media@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/social-media
