We use Planable to draft, review and post social media posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Planable is set up so that many people on the team can propose social media posts, but no posts can go live without a review.
Our goals for Planable are:
- to make it easy for staff to create social posts about what’s interesting or exciting in their work
- to give the communications team enough time to review social media posts without it being stressful
- to give everyone a structured and predictable social media post creation and publishing process
Why we post to social media
We use social media to share information that’s interesting or exciting to us. Our information should be timely, and it’s ok if posts are no longer relevant a week after they’re published.
Typical content for our social posts includes:
- announcements of events, blogposts, podcasts or major news
- celebration, appreciation or acknowledgement of someone or something in our community
- stuff we find interesting
- things we’ve learned (but blog for failures, since short form posts aren’t great for nuance)
Most of our social followers are real people (many of whom we know!) who are already excited about public code, so we don’t spam or try to convert them.
Read the commmunications plan for more information about our audiences and messages.
Tips for writing social media posts
- The most interesting posts are the ones from our community and codebases. Try to showcase their success stories before Foundation for Public Code centered news.
- Make sure the audience of your post matches the Foundation for Public Code audience.
- Keep in mind audiences in other time zones. Is your message important for them to read?
- Use the right tone in your post. Notice that enthusiasm varies whether we’re announcing something that excites us or not.
- Tag the organizations or people you are writing about if possible.
- Use relevant hashtags like #PublicCode, #StandardforPublicCode, #ltapc, #OpenSource, #GovTech, #FOSS
- In order to make the message more engaging, include an image or video with every post. Note that links usually unfold a preview of the content. Some emojis are also welcome.
- Always include a link for further information in case people are intrigued by what you’ve written.
Process
- Make sure you have access to Planable. If not, ask the communications team.
- Select the social media channel/s where you want your message to be published. Note that LinkedIn’s integration isn’t great when mentioning a person or company (@__), so edit your post after publication in LinkedIn to tag them correctly.
- Create your draft in Planable’s feed view. Note that this may not be the final message since it’s subject to review.
- Add a tag with your name so the communications team can reach out to you with questions.
- Schedule the message at least 24 hours in advance so the communications team have a margin to review the message.
- Check if there are already other scheduled posts for your preferred publishing time. If there are, start a conversation with the authors of those to finalize the scheduling.
- The communications team will probably tweak your post to be more successful - this is not a reflection on your abilities as a writer.
- Once reviewed, the communications team will approve or comment right next to your message in Planable.
Planable accounts
Most staff have contributor permissions: you can draft a post, comment and propose a scheduled publishing time.
You can also share a public link to your draft with anyone else you’d like to see it - they don’t need to have a Planable account to comment.
You don’t have permission to approve your post or the scheduled time - all posts must be approved by a second person before a post can go live.
Resources
- See the basic tweet template for a useful starting point
- Our illustrations
- Photos from past events