Developer Evangelism builds out their thought leadership through social media and community engagement. The tips and strategies shared here can be used by team members and the wider community to help build their own profile as an evangelist.
Topics:
Twitter and LinkedIn are the target platforms. Both platforms have different target audiences and content distribution.
Wil Spillane in Slack:
Tweets are more fleeting. I think a lot of folks choose to view tweets in reverse chronological order. For LinkedIn, the default is “top” posts and it’s not very visible to many to switch to “recent”. Also, LinkedIn shows posts with recent activity in the recent feed, not just the plain reverse chronological order that Twitter does. So in some ways, LinkedIn posts linger across feeds longer than a tweet.
#development and #DevSecOps are good examples, avoid them to include in every tweet though.@ character on Twitter, this can be hidden as reply and hinder audience reach on Twitter. Escape it with a leading . or an emoji. Example: .@gitlab 13.9 adds ....You can use Alfred's Powerpack with the emoji workflow to quickly access common emojis for tweets.
Alternatively, Better Tweetdeck offers the same auto-complete mechanism known from GitLab and Slack: Start with a : and type the emoji name to start the live search.
You can use Tweetdeck for scheduling tweets.
Developer Evangelists use Buffer in the Pro tier to manage scheduled campaigns. Buffer acts as a queue with async publishing functionality. This allows to collect interesting URLs from your browser and mobile, add them to the queue and publish in different time slots throughout the day/week.
Note that you can @ mention Twitter accounts only, the LinkedIn integration does not match. Buffer also allows to upload/override a social image for better visual appearances.
Helpful Buffer extensions/apps:
Buffer This Page. Shortcut on macOS: option + b.Read more in this article.
Buffer can be used to "live tweet" with the Share now functionality.
The TweetDeck search allows for logical expressions:
gitlab OR gitlabcommit
https://forum.gitlab.com/c/questions-and-answers.rss.Please see Metrics Collection & Analysis for our methods and tools.
This strategy can help amplify impressions and build out thought leadership.
Thanks for sharing :emoji: whenever neededExample: Chromium build times discussion led to self-hosted GitLab with auto-scaling runners on Monday. On Wednesday, we decided to try it live on YouTube in the #everyonecancontribute cafe. Max wrote a blog post afterwards.
#allremote and #remotework#LifeAtGitLab to share insights and funny moments.When you find something interesting to be shared with our brand account, please share it on Slack in #social_media_action and retweet by yourself too.
GitLab releases add lots of value every month. As a developer, you know about use cases and workflow enhancements they may solve specifically. Use this knowledge to describe why this new feature helps you.
The product kick-off provides insights into planned features. As we plan ambitiously, there is no guarantee that everything gets released as planned. Therefore release evangelism campaigns need to happen short notice around the 22nd each month.
Tip: GitLab team members can access the #release-post Slack channel to check for updates on the monthly release blog post. Wider community members can check the
gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com repositoryfor the release post MR, or follow the Developer Evangelism issues with the DE-Release-Evangelism label.
Workflow:
Tips:
Problem? -> SolutionKPIs:
High performing share examples for GitLab 14:
Past examples:
Developer Evangelists will take the end-user point-of-view and help review the release blog post items prior to a release around the 18th of each month. Reviews include:
The first pilot experiment was established with our Verify product group for GitLab 14.2 in August 2021. The DRIs were @jreporter (Group Manager, Product) and @dnsmichi (DE stable counterpart).
Next to our user research campaigns and feedback in the project issues, we often see feedback and interesting ideas on social media. Sometimes users tag our brand account @gitlab, in other scenarios we discover them with searching for gitlab.
With moving this into a direct question like If there would be one feature you could add, what would it be?, this can help identify stakeholders and encourages for a more direct feedback loop.
This effort needs a cross-team collaboration between product & engineering, social and DE teams. Assigned DE DRI is Michael Friedrich.
Workflow:
Second iteration: Make this a self-service with a request form, and automated response collection/updates in Slack or similar.
KPIs:
Move social shares into product channels, be it good feedback or additional experts required to answer. Tag GitLab team members and encourage them to respond/discuss on social media when they can benefit from the conversation. For heated discussions, stay within a small group of social media DRIs.
For incoming questions and involving more experts, Developer Evangelists can help in Slack in #developer-evangelism.
Example tweets for GitLab 12.9:
Have you created your first release through the in @gitlab yet? Let's do this!#gitlab #releasemanagementExample tweets for open-sourcing the registries:
Unstable npm mirrors no more: @gitlab got you covered - the NPM registry will be open sourced.#gitlab #packages #registry