Social Media Plan Discussion

[CatQueenCodes]

Title	Author	Date
Social Media Plan	Cat Queen/Grace	11/15/20

Social Media

Summary

• Get Odin more visibility on social networks to bring in more students
• Engage with existing students to emphasize community interaction
• Keep the social media world up to date on new implementations

Motivation

Get Odin more exposure!

Suggested implementation

I would like to start with one post a week across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram if applicable. Reddit doesn't like promotion, so I'd only be posting new features and courses on there. To start, I will just manually make posts on the platforms, but I will look into more efficient/automated ways to do it soon.

Drawbacks

None that I can think of. I just have to be careful not to make us come off as "bootcampy" (get rich quick, be amazing dev super quick)

Details

Platforms

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Instagram
• Youtube?

Reddit

• Purpose of Platform: Share news on new features of the site, new lessons in the curriculum

• /r/learnprogramming -sparingly, they limit self promotion

Twitter Facebook Instagram

• Purpose of Platform: Share news on new features of the site, new lessons in the curriculum, or notable project submissions, engage the community, keep active social media, fun updates

• Type of Content: Text and links with images sometimes.

• Weekly posts on Twitter and Facebook (instagram if applicable)

Weekly posts:

would be similar post across all platforms

Type of Content:

• "Coming soon" type stuff
• general coding tips that help out our learners/that Odin recommends
• posts related to Odin mission statement
• posts encouraging people
• stuff about self-taught programming
• Success stories
• student submissions/showcase- with a short blurb from that student (maybe once a month or so)
• occasional meme
• Post explaining what open source is/what we're all about
• how we have all types of students from varying backgrounds/ages/walks of life

As Needed Posts:

• New Features
• New Lessons
• Calls for help on large issues/projects

Post "Samples"

1. Want to learn web development but don't know where to start? We have made it easy! Check out or 'Foundations' path! It is a hands-on introduction to all of the essential tools you'll need to build real, working websites. We give you everything you need to set up your dev environment and get started! [link to foundations/pic]

2. New Feature Alert! Submit your completed projects directly to the Odin website. We have thousands of student project submissions, and now it is easier than ever to add yours to the site! View other students live projects, their code, and like your favorite projects! [pic of submissions portion]

3. Link to student project, blurb from that student about what they think of odin

4. Our Core Beliefs:

   Education should be free and accessible - 100% free forever, no gimmicks

   You learn best by building - we have projects throughout each path to practice and reinforce what you learn

   Motivation is fueled by working with others- We have an AWESOME supportive interactive discord community! [link]

   Open source is best- We are constantly improving with the help of our students who contribute to the curriculum on GitHub!

---

Any post ideas are welcome! I'll be making a list! Whatcha think?

[I3uckwheat]

I would also like to suggest showcasing some of the best projects we find submitted. This could be a "project of the week" kind of post if you need to have more volume of posts. It should be pretty easy to identify quality projects and get approval from the student to share their links in the #creation-showcase channel on Discord.

Another thing I would like to see is calls for help on the project. When we're gearing up to work on some things, it could be very nice to call out for help on the projects that may be larger.

All-in-all, I like this plan. I agree that Reddit is a touchy place when it comes to this stuff though. One way that could help get people on more of the platforms at once, would be to advertise the other platforms in posts once in a while, as well as posting different content across the different platforms to encourage multiple follows on the platforms.

[codyloyd]

This all looks pretty legit to me.

Want to add: whatever we decide to do, lets make sure its maintainable.... too often big pushes like this can tend to fizzle out over time.

IMO twitter is a good place for engaging with students... there are quite a lot of people posting their progress and 100daysofcode things over there. Occasionally retweeting and/or responding with some general encouragement seemed to be well received when I was doing it in the past..... but it wasn't something I could keep rolling forever.

Also echoing 'showcase projects'.. maybe dont' even have to find a project of the week.. just keep an eye out in the showcase channel and occasionally post some of the most impressive. When I did this I usually DMd and asked the creator if I could post and if they wanted me to mention their twitter handle.

[marvingay]

My only feedback is that one platform should be the focal point, whether that's twitter or otherwise and then posts from the primary platform, at least initially, should be re-posted to the others.

Any messages or posts that require an image should be posted to Instagram and re-shared elsewhere.

[ZachBaird]

@I3uckwheat I think that's what the following bullet point refers to:

student submissions/showcase- with a short blurb from that student (maybe once a month or so)

@codyloyd I agree. It might help to start small with some key initiatives like (ex. engaging with students on Twitter) and incrementally adding on other important items until we feel we're at some sort of capacity. I'm not sure what that would look like, but I think it's better than taking on a load of stuff at a time. I do think we should consider having more team members join in the effort if we see huge engagement on social media and want to expand further.

[CatQueenCodes]

@I3uckwheat I like the call for help idea, good way to get people engaged, I'll ask you guys if its something you'd like me to request public help on.

@codyloyd Def agree with that. Thats why to start I wanna do 1 post a week, and I'm going to go ahead and type up about 2 months of posts content soon so all I have to do is copy/paste them. I've never used twitter before, but I will try and reply if I can if someone asks a question on there! (I can promise that I'll make posts, can't promise I'll be on top of replying to everyone). I don't have twitter access yet, but when I looked at facebook, the posts from 2019 were reaching 10,000+ people.

@marvingay Should I not post pics on facebook? I feel like on Facebook if you attach a pic with your post it gets more attention/noticed.

[I3uckwheat]

@CatQueenCodes I think @marvingay was saying that one should be the main, but others can have some other content too. I think I've changed my tune to agree with @marvingay on this. It'll be much easier to maintain that way as well. I also vote Twitter.

[CatQueenCodes]

I'll get up to date with/learn twitter then!

[xandora]

No pressure!

9,612 Followers

:D

[xandora]

@CatQueenCodes

Def agree with that. Thats why to start I wanna do 1 post a week, and I'm going to go ahead and type up about 2 months of posts content soon so all I have to do is copy/paste them. I've never used twitter before, but I will try and reply if I can if someone asks a question on there! (I can promise that I'll make posts, can't promise I'll be on top of replying to everyone). I don't have twitter access yet, but when I looked at facebook, the posts from 2019 were reaching 10,000+ people.

If you have trouble keeping an eye on everything that goes on through the default Twitter interface, take a look at https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ as an overview. It will let you see things as an overview of the entire TOP page while also giving you quick access to things like Scheduled Tweets and alternate accounts (should you need it).

[CatQueenCodes]

@xandora I will for sure check that out, it seems super useful. Thank you!

Imo, current or past students talking about The Odin Project on social media (especially Reddit) is much more effective in terms of gaining new students. I'm not saying it'll be counterproductive to have official accounts though, I just don't think the public perception will be as great as we'd like.

If the goal is to have official social media accounts and grow the number of students as much as possible (without spending money on advertisements) I don't think there's a better avenue than focusing on LinkedIn. Tons of people looking to change careers right now and posts gain exposure quickly compared to other platforms where the reach is strongly limited by immediate connections/followers.

[CatQueenCodes]

I’m also hesitant about linking the discord on Twitter and fb posts because those people will be coming directly to discord without seeing the course info first so they’ll miss any etiquette/faq stuff and may lower discord quality

[I3uckwheat]

Consider this the approval/disapproval post on this plan. 👍 for yes, 👎 for no.

[rlmoser99]

I agree that linking directly to Discord on our social media accounts may not be the best solution, but I want to be prepared for how we should handle people asking questions like the most recent Facebook post. (Someone asked: Hi guys, don't know if this is appropriate but I just joined the Odin project but my system is 32bit. Do I need a 64bit to be able to take part in the project? )

This question was just ignored. I don't think we want any of our social media to turn into a place to receive direct help - essentially replacing the forum with 4 different social media accounts. I realize that we may have to take it case by case & see how people use our social media, but I think it's worth pondering this concern.

Maybe we can point people to the lesson about Discord etiquette, however I don't know if it is much different than right now people can just link to Discord anywhere on the TOP website, whether they have or have not seen the new & amazing Discord etiquette lesson. Maybe the Community link on our website should go to the Discord etiquette lesson instead of directly to Discord - or maybe a page with the highlights of that lesson?

[I3uckwheat]

@rlmoser99 That's a great point. I wonder if we could automate it with a bot that says "Hey! If you have questions, you should check out the website and ask in the Discord!"

I'm not opposed to editing the link to point to a special page for it. We could even make them click "agree" before getting a link.