Discussion: Promoting WordCamps with the official WordPress social accounts

With the recent return of in-person events, the Marketing team has seen an increase in requests to promote the various milestones of these events as they are organized, especially WordCamps. This often means posting about the event with our various social media accounts.

Previously, the primary WordPress accounts were not used for event promotion. We have been able to put together a few posts for the recent WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe and WordCamp US, but I would like to open this process up for discussion and codify it for the future so we can do more. For this, I have these goals in mind:

• To regularly amplify and elevate the individual WordCamp social accounts where possible.
• To provide an outline to event organizers of how, what, and when they can expect their updates/posts to be promoted.
• To ensure the equitable promotion of all the wonderful things happening in the WordPress community while also maintaining an optimal publishing schedule for each social platform (each with its own recommended volume of posts per day).

What events will be promoted

While we do receive requests to promote a variety of events, there is an immediate need to support the return of in-person WordCamps. The audiences of the WordPress social accounts are global, which makes the larger events a natural fit, but the inclusion of more localized camps also demonstrates the diversity of our community. So the events that would be highlighted include:

• WordCamp Asia (Twitter)
• WordCamp Europe (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin)
• WordCamp US (Twitter, Instagram)
• Other local WordCamps (sourced from the WordCamp Central schedule)

What types of announcements would be shared

Where available, sharing would be done via re-tweeting/re-sharing (platform dependent) of the content from the event’s accounts, written by the event organizers. Driving followers to these accounts encourages more local connections and promotes increasing diversity. This is also the most scalable approach, given that the official WordPress social accounts are shared spaces promoting releases, workshops, news, etc. Re-tweeting/re-sharing respects the work done by WordCamp organizers and maximizes visibility for the events both now and in the future.

In practice, this looks like the following examples:

Equitable implementation thoughts

As mentioned before, the WordPress social accounts are shared spaces. Posting every update, speaker announcement, and blog post would quickly become too much. Based on the requests so far, below are the milestones that would be shared for each of the flagship events (currently, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp US):

• Event website launched
• DEI statement published
• Call for organizers published
• Call for speakers published
• Call for volunteers published
• Call for photographers published
• Call for sponsors published
• Call for media partners published
• Speaker schedule published
• Ticket sales open
• Contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/ registrations open
• Week of event notice

For local WordCamps, periodic posts would highlight upcoming events listed on WordCamp Central, likely a week before the event. Periodic postings would also show appreciation for WordCamp organizers across the globe.

Feedback

I would like to gather feedback from everyone, especially those helping to organize WordCamps, on the points above. A few questions that come to mind are:

• Are there any concerns with re-tweeting/re-sharing content from individual WordCamp accounts?
• Are there any essential milestones missing from the list?
• Are there any milestones that should be removed?

Once we’ve collected feedback, we can add this to the handbook as a resource for organizers and members of the Marketing team.

+make.wordpress.org/community/

#social-media #social #handbook #twitter #wordcamp #events

Thank you to @bjmcsherry, @angelasjin, and @chanthaboune for contributing to this post.