Basic communication guide for XMPP techies

Why?

• People (your targets) are not aware of your project progress, your advantages and awesomeness
• At community level, it gives them the impression that the activity is low, and that the collective effort is dormant
• This page aims at showing it is quite easy and effortless to produce the bare minimum
• This is about original content, not sharing/curating (which adds a lot of value to your followers/readers)

Blog post

• Post regularly: a monthly frequency is achievable
• Length: it does not have to be long, 1 to 5 min read is doable, you have things to tell
• Content: examples are new software releases, reactions to news, explanation of a problem, benefits of your solutions, screenshots, screencast, explainer videos...
• Structure: do an intro and an outro, put titles/headings, choose your post title wisely, storytelling helps a lot
• Title(s): design a good post title, make relevant heading 2 and 3 titles (informative? provocative?)
• Illustrations: put awesome graphics (with attribution, license, and alt text)
• Keywords: think twice of your most important keywords, put them in titles, repeat them but not too often (these are the keywords you want to be searched/remembered for)
• CTA (Call To Action): don't let your crowd inactive, engage them (download and install, waiting for comments and feedback, contribute code, translate interface, etc.)

Social media

Twitter

• Text: very short, choose your keywords
• Hashtags: 2 or 3, not more
• Illustrations: mandatory, with attribution
• Link: direct link, or shortened for tracking

If you tweet about your latest blog post, tweet it two or three times per week, during one or two weeks, with different texts, focus on different sections

Example campaign: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/CommTeam/Newsletter_Twitter_campaign

LinkedIn

• Longer posts more serious than Twitter (more formal, professional audience)
• Make real sentences, punctuation, paragraphs
• Still use text, hashtags, link and illustration
• Comment your post, ask open-ended questions to encourage discussion
• Posts "last" longer than Twitter (retention on people's timelines), so frequency must be lower
• Fewer noise and content than Twitter, so more visibility

Mastodon

• We have not experimented it deep enough to emerge good practices

More?

We can document the specifics of the most popular platforms

Analytics

• bit.ly links: add a "+" symbol at the end of the link to access the stats (public)
• Twitter: per post "View tweet activity", or https://analytics.twitter.com
• LinkedIn: click on "XXX views of your post in the feed"
• Matomo on your blog (or Google Analytics)

Analytics/dataviz is here to learn (a bit), and generate more hypothesis. This is complimentary of qualitative info, like interviews or feedback (face to face or online survey).