In addition to promoting corporate and field events, content marketing assets, company updates, etc., we also undertake some activities just for our social communities. These help us communicate with and nurture our social communities, so we're not always treating social as a way to extract value or information from our followers. You wouldn't stay in a relationship that one-sided in real life, so why would you with a brand?
Here are some examples of native social events and social activities. You can open an issue in the marketing project and mention @evhoffmann if you'd like to propose a social activity.
So you've been nominated for a short-term takeover of GitLab's social channels — here's a quick guide with everything you need to know.
Format:
Create tracked links for every link back to about.gitlab.com (e.g., all blog posts, landing pages, etc.)
Publish and schedule in Sprout, using the “shorten links” button
Choose a tag for every post that goes out (there is a dropdown)
Preview posts in Sprout to make sure spacing, image, etc. looks fine on desktop and mobile
Timing:
Check the schedule in Sprout.
Do not publish more than 1-2 times per day on Facebook & LinkedIn (studies show > 2 posts per day on brand pages on these platforms starts to feel spammy).
Do not publish tweets within 30 minutes of each other. Retweets of other stuff within that time is fine.
Especially if someone reacts to an article that you tweeted with a substantive comment, question, or conversation starter, that is a good one to retweet promptly, because it could spur additional engagement.
If you’re debating between posting early and posting late, post early (i.e., 4 am Pacific). We have a sizable audience in Europe, so it’s best to resist posting after 4 pm PT (unless it’s a retweet, or a post that is newsworthy and published late)
Content:
Newly published posts
Retweet of substantive, high quality tweets, especially from team members
Can also fill some space in the afternoon with a job posting (“jobs of the week” are in the company call agenda doc)
Have fun with it! Be liberal with emojis.
Tip: Whereas on many other channels we always want a clear CTA, don't feel bound to this when writing for Twitter. Instead of always writing in the formation Interested in x? Click on y!, try to think about Twitter as a publishing channel rather than just a distribution channel. Try thinking about your tweet as a micro blog post: include the main thrust of the thing you're promoting, or write any funny or intriguing details that accent the information displayed on the twitter card. * For example, this tweet about burnout is one of our most popular of 2018. * We could have written something like "Here's what GitLab team-members have to say about burnout:" We do that plenty, but it's tedious if overused. * See what we did instead, and note how you can include incomplete sentences and details that will supplement, rather than duplicate, the information in the blog post title and description.
Engagement:
In addition to retweeting described above, please perform a search on #gitlab and gitlab a few times per day (can be within Sprout or twitter) and favorite positive mentions
Any particularly funny or complimentary posts, you can comment on with a gif, :blush:, “Thanks! We’re so glad you like it, let us know how we can help!” etc.
Be creative but refer back to these guidelines for the GitLab voice
Signing off
If you know there is going to be a long (1+ days) delay between when you need to sign off and when the next person takes over (i.e., for Summit travel), I recommend scheduling a tweet saying something like “The team is heading to beautiful Cape Town for our xth Summit! See you on the other side :airplane:” This helps prime people for the disruption of regular content.
Requesting Social Promotion
Open a separate issue for social
Some of the following is written specifically for field and corporate events; please follow the process and use the same issue template even if you are not requesting social for an event.
Open a separate issue for social in the marketing general project using the event-social label only once the event has been approved and a landing page has been created (i.e., try to only open an issue once it is ready for action.)
For an event to get promoted on social, there must be a dedicated social issue. Mentioning social in the meta issue is insufficient.
If the need is urgent (i.e., the event is happening now), Slack Emily vH. She reserves the right not to publish on social.
Luke will create social images if time permits - at least one week before desired publication is required for unique social images to be produced. If Luke has already been engaged for booth art, he may be able to turn them around on a shorter timeline, but this is at his discretion.
What to expect
Major corporate events will be promoted via organic social on GitLab's social channels. Emily vH will manage this.
Field events with landing pages on about.gitlab.com will be promoted via paid social, so that we do not saturate our audience, and so that we can use the more advanced targeting that paid social allows. The Digital Marketing Specialist (Starts Nov. 5 - interim LJ) will manage this.
Don't worry about the divide between paid and organic - we will determine the best fit for the event and coordinate among ourselves.
Note: the below are general suggestions based on best practices; the social media manager reserves the right to dial up or down the number of posts based on the event type and existing schedule.
Once images are finalized, Emily vH will schedule social within 2 days.
Tweets will go out from the corporate account: 1 week or more before event; 1 day before event; on the day of, with venue pictures if possible (see below)
The corporate account will also selectively retweet relevant tweets from GitLab team-members attending or speaking at the event.
LinkedIn and Facebook posts will go out: one week or more before the event; a few days before the event.
While at the Event:
Take pictures of booth and/or team members at booth and send them over Slack to Emily vH. Be sure to include any updates to the booth location (for instance, if the venue is confusing, you can say "near the north entrance", etc.)
Emily vH will aim to post them ASAP. If you are Slacking her outside of normal hours (for instance, for an event in EMEA), please have someone at the booth tweet from their own account using the event hashtag, and Emily vH will retweet from the corporate account when she starts the next day as a follow-up tweet.
Giveaways
We use giveaways to encourage and thank our community for participating in marketing events such as surveys, user-generate-content campaigns, social programs, and more.
Giveaways Process
Pre-giveaway
Create an issue and tag Emily von Hoffmann (@evhoffmann) to determine the rules of engagement and Emily Kyle (@emily) for prizes.
Winners must sign an Affidavit of Eligibility & Liability, Indemnity, and Publicity Release. Use the "Affidavit of Eligibility - Sweepstakes" template found on the google drive.
Announce the winners
Social Support & Logistics for Giveaways
Creating the Campaign
Set a launch date
Ask for social image(s) with text (if organic posts only) explaining the offer/ask
Set an initial deadline for submissions, so you can have multiple pushes at interval & ramp up energy
Finalize the delivery method: form vs. tweets vs. retweets, depending on the goals of the campaign
Pros of a form: Neat, uniform, easy for us to keep track of, no downsides of low engagement (i.e., responses not visible)
Pros of asking for submissions via Twitter: we could more easily RT cool responses, get more out of a hashtag, etc.
Pros of asking for RTs in exchange for swag: very little backend to do on social afterwards, except to announce the winners of swag
Finalize the ask, making sure it's extremely clear what you want to happen (Share your GitLab story!Tell us your favorite thing you made with GitLabtell us a time GitLab helped you out of a tight spot)
Make sure the ask can be intuitively communicated via whichever delivery method you're using, i.e., the tweet doesn't need to explain everything if you're pointing to a form or blog post. If you're not pointing to anything, make sure the tweet plus possible image text must make sense by themselves. Use threads for more space!
Pre-launch
Finalize the timeline for when the reminders/follow-ups will go out, add to social schedule and leave some space around them to RT/engage with responses
Finalize copy for all pushes
If swag is involved, create a google sheet with swag codes from Emily Kyle
Finalize hashtag
Ask community advocates to review all copy (tweets, form, blog post) and adjust according to their suggestions
Make sure the community advocates are aware of the campaign timeline/day-of
Designate a social point person to be "on duty" for the day-of and one person who can serve as backup
Let the broader GitLab team know that the social campaign is upcoming and ask for their support
Day of giveaway
If you have entries for the giveaway in a spreadsheet, use random.org to generate a random number. Match the number to the corresponding row in your spreadsheet to identify the winner. Never enter email addresses or personal information of participants into a third-party site or system we do not control.
Try to schedule first push or ask a team member to tweet the first announcement early (ex: around 4 am PT) to try to have some overlap with all our timezones
If you're asking for RTs in exchange for swag, make sure there's a clearly communicated cut-off to indicate that the giveaway will not stretch into perpetuity. One day-long is probably the longest you want a giveaway to stretch, or you can limit to number of items.
Plan to engage live with people
If your promise was to give away one hoodie per 25 RTs, do it promptly after that milestone is crossed. It adds to the excitement and will get more people involved
Announce each giveaway and use handles whenever possible, tell them to check their DMs
DM the swag codes or whatever the item is
In your copy, directly address the person/people like you are chatting with them irl
RT and use gifs with abandon but also judgment
After the Giveaway
Thank everyone promptly, internal & external
Write in the logistics issue of any snags that came up or anything that could've gone better
Amend hb as necessary for next time
How to Create an Official Sweepstakes Rules Page
Create a new folder in /source/sweepstakes/ in the www-gitlab-com project. Name the folder the same as the giveaway /source/sweepstakes/name-of-giveaway
Add an index.html.md file to the /name-of-giveaway/ folder
Add the content of this template to the index.html.md file.
Replace all bold text with relevant information.
Create merge request and publish.
Social Channels and Audience Segmentation
You can find a list of evergreen content assets their primary channel for promotion here.
Twitter
Content/Execution
Broad audience - all our content gets shared here, but tone should still appeal to devs.
5 or more tweets per day, plus retweets
Schedule between 12 am - 5 pm PT (A large part of our audience is in EMEA, and we find an increase in organic impressions and engagement when we schedule tweets for their morning and workday)
At least 30 mins apart
Aim for variety & roughly even mix of main topics: Git, CI/CD, collaboration, DevOps, employer branding, product-specific, community articles & appreciation
Check mentions at least once per day, pull out articles to share with the team and favorite positive mentions.
Keep a list of our most engaged followers; keep these in mind for opportunities outside of social–blogging, live streamed interview etc.
Goals
15 tweets per day
2-4 videos published natively per month
5 lead-generating content items from the backlog published per month
Consider takeovers. Would need to develop an instructions kit & think about how/who to pilot.
Facebook
Content/Execution
Developer/community- and thought-leadership focused
1-2 facebook posts per day
At least 2 hours apart
Live events are more company/culture focused
talks by or AMAs with People Ops, etc.
Goals
Consider streaming a webcast on Facebook Live (a simple toggle switch in Zoom allows this) and compare the performance to YouTube live streaming
When the speaker cameras are enabled in Zoom webinars, natively publish clips of webcasts for post-promotion.
LinkedIn
Sometimes, posts that GitLab team-members propose for our blog may be a better fit for native publishing on LinkedIn. This is not a negative, it's usually due to the content team's strategic priorities at the time. Rebecca and Emily vH will recommend that you publish on your own LinkedIn, and if you agree, Emily vH will help you finalize the post and socialize it internally for best results.
Content/Execution
IT buyer/manager focus
3-5 posts per week
Non-tutorial original blog posts
Press releases/product announcements
Posts around particular features, releases, company culture, people ops new practices, problem/solution or personal growth structured posts; include links back to homepage
Goals
Identify key LinkedIn groups to join/share content in
Native posts on LinkedIn
Encourage targeted employees to do so; think of incentive/framing as professional development that we will help edit.
Curate and share articles from other publishers on remote work/culture that we want to elevate
Medium
GitLab has a Medium publication, and all GitLab team-members may be added as writers! To be added as a writer to the publication, import a blog post that you authored on about.gitlab.com/blog to your personal Medium account, and submit it to the GitLab publication (by hitting edit -> submit to publication -> GitLab Magazine). Emily vH will approve you as a writer and help finalize the post before publishing.
If you submit original content (i.e., not originally published somewhere else) to the publication for review, she may edit and publish your post. We want to highlight writers wherever possible, so we highly encourage you to import posts to your personal Medium.
Content/Execution
Brand and thought leadership-focused
Favorite articles about GitLab
Aim to post one article to Medium every two weeks
Cross-post our original thought-leadership posts to Medium, linking back to blog
Group Conversations, pick your brain meetings, demos, brainstorms, kickoffs
Google+
Content/Execution
Re-post older articles from the archive periodically that we want to continue giving a boost
Aim for at least one post per week
Defining Social Media Sharing Information for web pages
Social Media Sharing info is set by the post or page frontmatter, by adding two variables:
description:"shortdescriptionofthepostorpage"twitter_image:'/images/tweets/image.png'## Ensuring your Post Will Have a Functional Card and ImageWhen you post a link on Facebook or Twitter, either you can see only a link, or a full interactive card, which displays information about that link:title, **description**, **image** and URL.For Facebook these cards are configured via [OpenGraph Meta Tags][OG]. Twitter Cards were recently set up for our website as well.Please compare the following images illustrating post's tweets.A complete card will look like this:![TwitterCard example - complete][twitter-card-comp]An incomplete card will look like this:![TwitterCard example - incomplete][twitter-card-incomp]Note that the [first post] has a **specific description** and the image is a **screenshot** of the post's cover image, taken from the [Blog landing page][blog]. This screenshot can be taken locally when previewing the site at `localhost:4567/blog/`.
This information is valid for the entire website, including all the webpages for about.GitLab.com, handbook, and blog posts.
Images
All the images or screenshots for twitter_image should be pushed to the www-gitlab-com project at /source/images/tweets/ and must be named after the page's file name.
For the second post above, note that the tweet image is the blog post cover image itself, not the screenshot. Also, there's no description provided in the frontmatter, so our Twitter Cards and Facebook's post will present the fall back description, which is the same for all about.GitLab.com.
For the handbook, make sure to name it so that it's obvious to which handbook it refers. For example, for the Marketing Handbook, the image file name is handbook-marketing.png. For the Team Handbook, the image is called handbook-gitlab.png. For Support, it would be named handbook-support.png, and so on.
The description is not meant to repeat the post or page title, use your creativity to describe the content of the post or page. Try to use about 70 to 100 chars in one sentence.
As soon as you add both description and social sharing image to a page or post, you must check and preview them with the Twitter Card Validator. You can also verify how it looks on the FB feed with the Facebook Debugger.
Examples
To see it working, you can either share the page on Twitter or Facebook, or just test it with the Twitter Card Validator.
Complete post, with description and twitter_image defined: GitLab Master Plan
Incomplete post, with only the description defined: Y Combinator Post
