Social Media for Open Source Communities
November 16, 2015
This is the final post in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.
For a community that prides itself on “openness” and “collaboration,” the open source community does not always readily embrace social media as a means to promote their projects and get people involved.
Rikki Endsley, from OpenSource.com, gave a quick rundown of best practices for all social media, and some of the key platforms in particular.
For those of us that do this for a living, her tips were not groundbreaking, but it’s always nice to get a quick refresher course on what we should be doing to promote our projects.
Her key takeaways were:
- Send out Relevant, Interesting, Accurate Information
- Know who your audience is
- Craft your text
- Use hashtags
- Avoid PR Speak
- Numbers do well
- Ask questions
- Images are very important
- Retweet, Respond, Reshare, Reply
I think even experience social media professionals can use this refresher course from time to time, and it was an excellent way to talk about how Open Source communities can get out of their small bubble and welcome more people in, which was, after all, the point of the conference.
