[Wikimedia-l] Re: @Wikipedia losing opportunities in Twitter

Hi Galder,

Respectfully, we use Twitter's definition of engagement rate https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/using-the-tweet-activity-dashboard. Over the last 28 day period, the Wikipedia account garnered a 3.0% engagement rate. On Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media#Re:_Twitter_engagement_questions, I previously shared several resources that confirm this is above industry standards, as I thought you were asking as a point of interest. The conversation, since, steered into an 'apples and oranges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apples_and_oranges' comparison of two different accounts with different strategies, audiences, and goals.

Again, we will be discussing our social media strategy with members of the Wikimedia communities on the Communications Committee in the near future. For this discussion, I believe it has become circular and detracts from our important work. I hope we can leave things at a place of respectful agreement (or disagreement).

Lauren *Lauren Dickinson (she/her)* Senior Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 4:32 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello again, A couple of weeks ago this conversation was moved to Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media#Re:_Twitter_engagement_questions. There Lauren, from the Social Media team provided a couple of numbers to show how @Wikipedia handle on Twitter is doing "above the industry standards". The problem is that this numbers are plainly false. The team is dividing the number of interactions by the number of impressions, instead of the number of followers, that is what the metric was asking for.

I have asked there for the exact data on impressions, in order to calculate the real impact, but once the team has seen that their numbers are wrong, they are using distraction tactics in order to bury the problem.

So, as moving it to Meta seems like a move to forget about this, I would like to discuss the topic again. Can someone in the WMF provide the number of interactions we had in the last 28 days so we can see if, indeed, we are "above the industry standards"?

Thanks

Galder

*From:* The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com *Sent:* Tuesday, July 19, 2022 1:55 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: @Wikipedia losing opportunities in Twitter

I'm glad this conversation is moving over to meta-wiki. I hope the communications staff will recognize their job should be to facilitate the volunteers to do the work when it comes to anything other than speaking for the Foundation.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2022, 2:22 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Lauren, I have followed there, because I think we are measuring two very different things when talking about engagement.

Have a good day Galder

2022(e)ko uzt. 18(a) 19:48 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Lauren Dickinson < ldickinson@wikimedia.org>):

Hi Galder, I just left a more detailed reply on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media#Re:_Twitter_engagement_questions so we can continue the conversation there. In summary, we refer to a few different sources to benchmark our engagement rates on @Wikipedia. According to Rival IQ https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/social-media-industry-benchmark-report/, the median Twitter engagement rate for brands across all industries is 0.037%; for nonprofits specifically, it is 0.054%. According to Adobe https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/what-is-a-good-social-media-engagement-rate, "most would consider 0.5% to be a good engagement rate for Twitter, with anything above 1% great." @Wikipedia Twitter's engagement rate, according to the dashboard https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/using-the-tweet-activity-dashboard we access when logged-in to the account, over the last 28 day period is 2.7%. In May and June, it was 2.6% and 2.2%, respectively. I hope the resources shared are helpful for your management of @euwikipedia.

It's difficult to draw direct comparisons between the @euwikipedia and @wikipedia accounts due to the difference in follower size and our more global focus, as well as the objectives we are prioritizing to support the movement but also build resonance among groups who can help us to push forward our knowledge equity goals. At the same time, a straight comparison—with the understanding that I cannot see the analytics for the @euwikipedia account—reveals more retweets, likes, and comments on the @Wikipedia account. I'd like to better understand however if we are defining engagement differently. Also, an overall higher engagement rate from Twitter's analytics could be a result of the low base effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_base_effect (comparing two accounts of different sizes).

Please note that I am managing a family commitment this week. I am happy to continue this conversation on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media#Re:_Twitter_engagement_questions when I return.

Also, Andy, we will follow up this week regarding your questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Twitter about the @WiktionaryUsers and @Wiktionary accounts. We do not currently have access but are exploring potential options via Twitter now.

Thank you, all, for your comments.

Lauren *Lauren Dickinson (she/her)* Senior Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

On Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 5:16 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the answer, Lauren. I see quite a few interactions with the tweets (despite having more than half a million followers). You say that the engagement is above the industry standard. Is there any data we can use to compare? I'm one of the managers of @euwikipedia and I see we have even more engagement than @wikipedia, so I would like to know which are those industry standards, so we can also measure ourselves.

Thanks

Galder

2022(e)ko uzt. 14(a) 00:56 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Lauren Dickinson < ldickinson@wikimedia.org>):

Hi again — thanks for these comments!

I wanted to add that we very regularly refer to the ITN/DYK sections (and OTD, too) when planning out the content calendar and responding to current news and topics. These are great, natural sources of topic inspiration for the Wikipedia channels.

As mentioned, we welcome other ideas for articles / topics to share. I understand that the form may not always be the best way to do this. So, I invite you to share ideas and feedback on Meta-Wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media (we just did a light clean up of the page). I am also a member of the Facebook group (Wikimedia social media hub) that Andy shared; I see most posts, but the form and Meta-Wiki are the best way to reach me.

For additional perspective, based on the note from Galder, there are currently two staff, including myself working on digital communications strategy at the Foundation, which includes both the Wikimedia and Wikipedia social accounts, as well as our website and blogs. Across all, we prioritize showing up with a consistent voice and identity, so through association, people understand our work better.

Our strategy is global and we try hard to give equal weight to topics that reflect the diversity of our world and movement—keeping track of movement happenings, edit-a-thons, user group initiatives, current events, and trends in places across the world. Rather than focusing on putting out a large quantity of content, our goal with each post is to make people understand the diverse work that the movement does and the diverse range of knowledge that can be discovered on Wikipedia. This fosters understanding with those who may not have deep knowledge of how the movement works and what we stand for, but who may want to join us if they did.

In addition to our regular content, we must be constantly vigilant and address potential misunderstandings about our work and projects. We monitor social chatter closely and strive to ensure that our content and replies meet the standards that uphold movement values. We track the metrics and impact of our social media efforts and find that our strategy is working well. For example, over the last year, we saw a 7% increase in Wikipedia's Twitter following and a consistent above-average engagement rate when compared to industry standards.

Lastly, I'll note that we are planning to discuss our refreshed digital communications strategy with ComCom https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee in the coming months. It includes lessons gleaned over the last two years on how to position community work so that it reaches the right audiences and helps to advance movement goals. One of our focuses is on better amplifying the work of volunteers in the movement, and we are eager to get reactions / ideas on ways we can do this even more.

I hope this is all helpful context and information. Thanks again for sharing your ideas and feedback with us.

Lauren *Lauren Dickinson (she/her)* Senior Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

On Wed, Jul 13, 2022 at 4:24 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the answer, Lauren.

I have been looking at the stats of the last 4 weeks in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to make an idea of the activity those accounts have. I don't know how many people takes part in the process, but as I read "We" in the answer, I'm going to assume that is more than one person to do all of this job.

In Twitter, before my e-mail (after that there was a tweet by Wikimedia Chile that was mentioned by @Wikipedia), the last tweet was two days before. From June 10th to July 10th 34 tweets were done, 5 of them about the concept "tea". That makes roughly one tweet a day, but there have been many days without any tweet activity. In Facebook I count 24 posts related to Wikipedia. This is 0,77 posts per day. In Instagram the situation is worse, only 9 posts in one month, is to say, one every 3 days. It could be that June 10th to July 10th is a bad moment, but I have looked up previous months, and the trend is the same: most of the days is 1 tweet, there are some days with 0 activity, and some other days with 3-4 tweets, usually about the same topic.

I don't know how long it takes to do that, but based on my experience managing social media, this activity (a tweet a day, 0,7 posts in Facebook a day and 0,3 posts in Instagram, that actually are about the same topic) takes around 30 minutes per day, a little bit longer if I need to take extra-extra care to choose the article. I don't know how many workers are in this process, but I assume that the "we" means than is more than one.

Let me help with this, because there are many processes that can booster the activity and make our engagement in social media better. In the French Wikipedia they have a page where people can propose tweets about curious things ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil/Twitter/Tweets). These tweets are shared with the hashtag #WPLSV https://twitter.com/hashtag/WPLSV. Viquipedia https://twitter.com/Viquipedia/ is another success story, with a great engagement (far better than the @Wikipedia account, by the way).

In the Basque Wikipedia account (https://twitter.com/euwikipedia) we have an internal shared spreadsheet where we put in the columns the days and in the rows the scheduled time for the tweet. Every day (yes, we have only one time zone, what makes things easier) we try to open with two "on this day". This is extra easy, because you only need to look to the article about the day and choose some that may be interesting or round numbers (100 years ago today...). Then we try to tweet every day something about science, then social sciences or history, a building, a fiction or artwork and we end the day with a third "on this day" that may be more curious. We have two extra time sections reserved for news about Wikipedia itself (statistics, wikiprojects, featured content...) and something related to news of the day/current events. We also tweet about sex whenever we have new content every Friday at 23:59. This makes around 8 tweets a day, with some extra options if we have something extra to tell, or there is an important recent death, etc... Is true that we are not posting in Facebook or Instagram, but this is a task we do when we have spare time in our regular jobs: we don't have any extra worker to manage them. It takes around 4-5 hours to make a full schedule for a month (and it would take less in English Wikipedia, where there's plenty of content), and then around 8-10 hours to schedule the ~250 tweets we make a month.

If you need help to manage the Twitter account, don't hesitate on contacting other members of the community. We can help with this.

Sincerely, Galder

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*From:* Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk *Sent:* Wednesday, July 13, 2022 8:37 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: @Wikipedia losing opportunities in Twitter

On Wed, 13 Jul 2022 at 01:23, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

...

+1, not just en:wp. I'd love to see community mods involved in

maintaining the core social accounts.

We have a Facebook group (not the ideal venue, but it works for those of us on that site), "Wikimedia social media hub" [1], for that; but WMF staff decided to cease their involvement about 18 months ago.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikisocialmediahub _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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