Hi all,

We are only 5 days into WLM 2019 and so far it's been amazing! More than 28000 photos already! Kudos to all local organizers! 

The international team has been promoting the contest on its social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). We do our best to reach out to as many people as possible,but in many cases, due to language barrier, it's much more effective to do promotion in the local language. We've noticed increased activity on social media by national competitions and we certainly hope this momentum carries over until the end of the contest.

Here are some tips to help you promote your campaign on social media:
  1. Link all your social media to each other so when you post on one, it automatically shows up on the other ones. Linking Facebook and Instagram accounts is pretty straightforward and you can do it from either platform. Instagram stories can be shared on Facebook stories as well. If you'd like to share your FB and IG posts on Twitter you can use IFTTT service. It has some limitations (e.g., for posts with multiple images) but overall it's quite useful.
  2. Make use of WLM stats page. It's a wonderful tool to keep track of your local contest. You can see the total number of uploads, number of users, and the daily breakdown. It also shows where you stand in comparison to other national campaigns.
  3. Stay active throughout the month of September. In addition to making posts make sure to like relevant posts and encourage those who are potential participants by commenting under their posts/photos. 
  4. Use Facebook and Instagram stories to keep your audience engaged. If you have a large follower base, consider running a live event (e.g., Instagram Live) for your audience to go live and ask questions.
  5. It's hard to constantly generate content. There are some easy ways that will help you make a post without too much work. The best way is to share someone else's story or post. One easy trick is again the stats. Everyday the international team shares the stats in a story. For example, today we posted "25882 photos so far and so far and counting, Ukraine 4156, Italy 3244 ..." This is a good way of keeping the excitement alive.
  6. Be proactive! If you see a profile on social media with monument photos invite them to share their photos through WLM. This is perhaps one of the most effective ways. Typically, I leave a comment like this: "Great pics of cultural heritage. Please consider sharing your photos on Wikipedia through Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition. It runs through Sep. 30 with the goal of visual documentation of monuments on Wikipedia." This encourages people to join and puts all the keywords (monument, Wikipedia ...) in a short message.
  7. It's all about word of mouth so ask your followers/friends to be your ambassadors and encourage others to join. Previous years' participants are typically excellent candidates to help with promotion. 
  8. If you have access to people with large accounts ask them to tell their followers about WLM. This, if done correctly, can help a lot. When Wikipedia account on Instagram started following us and told about us to their followers we immediately got many new followers.
  9. Make sure to update your information on this page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2019/Social_Media so we keep you in mind when promoting WLM on our social media
  10. Consider switching to a business profile on Instagram. It allows you to look at stats and performance of each post and the overall audience of your account. It's free and contrary to what the name suggests won't make you look like a business. You can select the category to be: Community Organization
  11. If there is a specific monument that you want to have a photo of, you can easily find people who have photos of that monument on social media. Let's say you want photos of Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania. If you search #KilwaKisiwani on Instagram you will find 280 photos with this tag. Some of them look good for Wikipedia. You can then just leave a comment or send a message to the photographer and ask them to submit the photo through WLM. This works particularly well with countries that have a short list of monuments or the newcomers to WLM who don't have a large follower base.
If we have missed you or you feel you'd want us to mention you more frequently, please send an email to wikilovesmonuments.insta@gmail.com. 

Thanks and good luck,
Mohammad