Social media series to promote creators and projects

[Changaco]

Before attempting #188 I think it could be good to help our followers on Mastodon and Twitter simply discover Liberapay profiles they may not know about. Concretely we need a hashtag and a list of profiles to promote, then we have to write a short message about each creator/project and post one per day. For Diaspora* we could post less frequently (e.g. 1 per week) by grouping several items in a single message, like we usually do for our news.

All this is a lot of work, which is why I haven't been doing it. Liberapay is already growing without it so my priority is development not advertisement. However if others want to do it then I can help build the list of profiles to promote (by building the appropriate admin tools that we need anyway for proper moderation).

cc @liberapay/media-managers

[trebmuh]

Could you point an example of what you are thinking of @Changaco ? (or showing one here if you never pouet-ed/tweet-ed one yet)

[mattbk]

I was thinking of a "trending" metric (as GitHub does weekly) that could be used to select some profiles. % growth in donations or patrons since last week (excluding those who were at 0 last week). I know this is a "the rich get richer" strategy of promotion because we'd be promoting those who are already growing, but those are the accounts that would hopefully attract new users.

What do you mean by "proper moderation"?

[trebmuh]

Could you point an example of what you are thinking of Changaco ? (or showing one here if you never pouet-ed/tweet-ed one yet)

Ping @Changaco

BTW, I'm wondering the following: if you/we are to build a list of profiles to promote, wouldn't it be a good idea (ie: easier to manage, less time-consuming) for this list to be:

• link to the user/project LP profile
• a short message about how great is this project/person and why does she/he/it deserve to be promoted

and then to auto-post from this list to Mastodon/twitter once a day?

I can do then a weekly summary on Diaspora* as you suggested in your previous message here.

[Changaco]

Could you point an example of what you are thinking of @Changaco ? (or showing one here if you never pouet-ed/tweet-ed one yet)

https://twitter.com/liberapaye/status/784353830288842752 https://twitter.com/liberapaye/status/733419218348085248 https://twitter.com/liberapaye/status/728562985837338624

[Changaco]

What do you mean by "proper moderation"?

I mean systematically reviewing all accounts to better detect fraud and quickly put controversial profiles into isolation so we don't advertise them.

[Changaco]

auto-post from this list to Mastodon/twitter once a day?

We don't have an auto-post tool set up for Mastodon or Twitter.

[trebmuh]

@Changaco is there already such a list? If not and if that can help, I can start one by myself.

(I'd like this to be kicked in)

[Changaco]

There is no list yet.

(I'd like this to be kicked in)

I would also like to see it start before the end of the month. I'll try to build the admin tool we need to get a complete list as soon as possible.

[Changaco]

We still don't have a hashtag though.

On Mastodon someone proposed #TipYourFriends to replace #OneDollarPatreon, but it didn't really catch on and I'm not sure "friends" is the right word.

[trebmuh]

Sharing here some ideas : #LiberaTip #TipACommoner #TipCommon If I've got others, I'll write those here.

[jorgesumle]

I was thinking of a "trending" metric (as GitHub does weekly) that could be used to select some profiles. % growth in donations or patrons since last week (excluding those who were at 0 last week). I know this is a "the rich get richer" strategy of promotion because we'd be promoting those who are already growing, but those are the accounts that would hopefully attract new users.

That is a problem. I didn't think a lot about it before. We can't be fair with everyone, and if we select randomly, we could promote an already rich or unattractive example. The only solutions I can think of are:

• covering a fake team or creator from each community and then linking to the related Community page. The point would be to say that Liberapay can be useful for artists, free software advocates, non-profits, etc., not to promote an specific person. Which would be confusing if people don't realise that the interview is fake and try to support that fake person.
• Select it randomly, but openly stating the criteria on which we base our profile or team selection, so that we aren't unfair. I propose that we promote anyone that's not in the 2 most donated teams or accounts from a given community, and the profile or community should have an icon, description and short description. Before interview the first person, we should announce that we're launching this campaign explaining the criteria we'll choose for the following weeks. We could make an SQL query to obtain all valid candidates, and select one of them with a random number (but select the random numbers before we have the list?, or some way we cannot manipulate the result.). The interview should be made by email, CCing the members of the media managers team for transparency (we need to now if the email have been sent).

I prefer the second idea. Any thougths, idea, improvement?

[mattbk]

we could promote an already rich [...] example.

This isn't inherently bad, because one of the points of marketing in this way is to show how people/projects have become the size (in number/amount of donations) they are today. You want people to join the platform and bring their donors because they believe they can adequately support themselves.

The other point is obviously to lift up those people/projects who deserve more support, which I think you are getting it.

[eldelacajita]

I like this idea. If it hasn't been done yet, it could be a quick and easy way for me to jump in and help with communication. I don't even need access to the social media accounts for now. I could prepare a list and write the tweets so someone with access to the accounts can publish them (maybe by scheduling them). If that would be useful at all, that is...

• For the list, I'd suggest going with a manual selection that combines both successful profiles and other interesting ones that could use a push.
• A "published" section of the list could be kept in order to avoid repetitions, at least in the beginning.
• For the hashtag, I think #LiberaTip works great, both as "small amount" and as "suggestion".
• Also, a featured image could be added when the user/project has some interesting visual/graphic results (screenshots, artwork...). That would need a bit more work.

[trebmuh]

Great that you're re-pushing this thread @eldelacajita . I'd really like to see this going on. FWIW, I'll not have a lot of time to work on it until mid-august roughly.