Engagement/Social/Best Practices
Contents
Overview
So you want to learn how to get the most out of social media for your product or project? That's great! This section will teach you the basics about developing your social strategy, creating content and nurturing relationships with users. Feel free to edit this page with your own experiences and tips too. If you have any questions, send an email to socialmedia@mozilla.com.
Developing your social strategy
Before you start posting or tweeting, you will want to create goals for your social presence and draft a plan of how you will get there. Here are some things to consider:
- Who is your audience? Mainstream users, developers, contributors or other stakeholders?
- What experiences do you want to create for your followers? Are you educating them? Sharing news? Having conversations with them? Interacting with fun content? Creating a community of contributors or advocates?
- How often should your audience be hearing from you?
- Where is your audience located? How will you talk to your followers in their native language?
- How will you keep your followers engaged?
Choosing the right social networks
You want to be on the networks where your audience is and where your content will have the most impact. If your followers are early adopters, using Twitter, Google+ or similar social networks makes sense. If your followers are more mainstream or less tech savvy, having a Facebook page can be a great way to talk with your audience. If your followers speak different languages, choose a social network that allows you to target content by language (like Facebook) or create separate accounts for each locale on that network.
Additionally, certain social networks are more appropriate for specific region. Take a look at which network is most popular in the regions your followers live:
If you aren't sure which networks are the best way to reach your audience, the User Engagement team would be happy to give you some advice.
Creating your content
Which social media channels should my content be posted to?
If you manage social media for a product or community, you will mostly share content from those accounts. You can also post to your personal accounts.
If you want to reach broad audiences, you can work with the appropriate Engagement team. Send a note to the appropriate group with your request and timing needs - here are email addresses for Engagement teams.
Localizing your content
If you want your content to be localized, the copy and links need to be finalized in advance for the translated content to be ready for your publication date.
For localized posts on User Engagement social channels, please submit your content at least two weeks in advance to socialmedia@mozilla.com and note which locales you are targeting in order to have your content translated. At the moment, we are only able to localize content on Facebook. We will have localized Twitter accounts shortly.
Scheduling your post
If you are posting to a social account you manage, you can use a tool such as CoTweet to schedule your post in advance. This allows the post to be published at a time in the future, even if you're not online. This is especially helpful for regional posts that might be at inconvenient times in your time zone.
If you are posting to the Firefox accounts, the User Engagement team can add your post to their content calendar and they will publish the post for you.
Posting your content
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Shorten links
For any short URLs in your content, be sure to shorten them to mzl.la links. This not only reduces the character count, but it also gives you analytics about clicks and helps with brand consistency since all Mozilla links are shared as mzl.la links.
Any URL on mozilla.org or mozilla.com can be shortened by pasting the link on bit.ly. If you want to shorten a non-Mozilla URL, please email socialmedia@mozilla.com to have the link created for you.
Social post check list
Before you publish your content, make sure you have completed these steps to ensure a successful post:
- Proofread content for spelling and grammar.
- Ask another person to read over the post - having another pair of eyes to look something over helps to catch most mistakes.
- Check links work properly and are localization friendly.
- If your post isn't specific to en-US, remove the "en-US/" string from all URLs so that users in other locales will see the page in their native language.
- If your link contains special tracking parameters (eg WebTrends tags), verify that the tracking is working correctly.
- If you are targeting the post to a specific group of your followers, set the locale or geography targeting options.
- If your post contains any media, make sure you are using the appropriate media formats and preview the post content before publishing it. For Facebook posts, only attach images in JPG format. GIF and PNG formats may not always display correctly.
