Re: [Wiki Loves Monuments] Social Media Tips to Increase WLM Participation

Hi all, My apologies for the long email but there are important tips that can help you with promoting your campaign on social media so please bear with me :) 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. Here are some tips to help you promote your campaign on social media: 1. Make use of WLM stats page <https://tools.wmflabs.org/wlm-stats/> by Emilio. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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 "so far we've got >45000 photos by >3200 uploaders from 53 countries." This is a good way of keeping the excitement alive. 5. 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. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. Consider paid promotions on social media. They are cheap and they can reach to a very large number of people. But make sure to make it targeted. If you need help contact me. 9. Make sure to update your information on this page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2018/Social… so we keep you in mind when promoting WLM on our social media Finally I would like to thank all our local organizers. You are all doing a great job and it's so exciting to see so many beautiful monument images from all over the world. Keep up the good work! Thanks, Mohammad _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org