Forum:Using Social Networking Sites

As of now, we're #48 in the WAM rankings. While we've fallen a long way down (we used to be in the top 10!), we do still have an immerse following. But most readers don't interact with the community at all, and vice versa. So I'd like to propose the wiki having official accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and any other popular social networking sites. By doing so, we'd be able to interact with our readership, and possibly attracting more editors, and if word spread about us, we will also gain readers.

I'm aware that Hungry used to run a Twitter for One Piece Wiki, and that we apparently have a somewhat active Facebook page already (I don't even know who runs it at all, and I asked around!). However, the Twitter account is gone now, and the Facebook page doesn't really interact with the community, at least, interact the way I'd like us to do so, and is run by someone we don't know.

So what I am suggesting is that we have official accounts for this wiki on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and use them to interact with readers, answering any questions they have, alerting them of important changes and discussions they may wish to participate in, and so on. Many other wikis also do the same, and I see no ways this can hurt us, so why not do this? 00:27, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

Discussion
I dunno how this would work, or IF it would work. But no harm in trying, I guess. 00:40, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

So Ryu told me that he's an admin at the Facebook page for this wiki, and that Jaimini and SHB are also admins. So I guess that mystery is solved now. 02:05, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

First off, I really like this idea, and I hope that we can follow through with it. We just need a dedicated team of people to run this stuff. I'll certainly help out on Facebook, perhaps twitter if I learn how that works, but someone else should take the reigns on that.

I like the idea of allowing people to submit questions and we, as experts on OP answer at least one daily. It would be a neat way to interact with readers, and it would help cut down on the useless questions that get posted but don't belong on talk pages, forums, etc. that alway. We could even keep a cool archive of all the questions on the wiki that's easier to read than going back through a twitter or facebook page.

And if we get a decent following, we can use it to help expand our editing base, by asking for things like translators, editors to focus on our woefully uninformative music pages, etc.

Anyone else have ideas of things we could do with it? 03:34, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

There's also the youtube channel that IH, SHB and Calu used for the podcast. We might be able to do something with that. 05:06, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

If we're going to have an official one piece wiki facebook page, we should have a facebook widget on the main page of the wiki. 09:58, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

The Italian One Piece Wiki has pages on the social networks and I manage them. In my opinion:
 * Start off with one or two pages and see if you can keep it up. Probably Facebook and Twitter are the best ones to start with and you can also link the Twitter account to the Facebook one, so in realty you can start just with Facebook.
 * Be clear on who has access to the accounts and who manages them. Facebook has a role system similar to Wikia's, so in my opinion only this wiki's admins should become the page admins, then whoever other user is helping can just be a content creator. I'm saying this so that will be easier to contact who has access to these pages if needed and to minimize the risk of account steal (there are plenty of people who will offer to become admins "to help" while in reality the moment they do that will demote all other admins and steal the page) and to avoid "phantom pages" (pages whose admins left and the access to the was lost). If you prefer, I can also talk to staff if they have suggestions on the matter. In my opinion, we can also give access to one of them as "safeguard".
 * Since these pages will probably be managed by more then one person, it goes without saying that you need to be careful on the accounts security (like sharing passwords/access and so on). I think Twitter is the most troublesome one because it's not like Facebook pages: it's just an account. Therefore once created, you have to share the password to give access to it. Also it will require an email and I don't think it's a good idea to use someone's personal email, hence you will probably have to create a "wiki" email account too (just use the same password to make it easier).
 * If you are concerned about privacy, in Facebook the identity of the administrators is not "public" unless you choose to make it that way. However the administrators themselves know each other.
 * Content: decide what type of content you'd like to focus on. Maybe you can create a dedicated forum here on the wiki so that people can give you feedback too. Since there are literally thousands of pages about One Piece, I suggest to differentiate from the others (who usually post fanarts and theories) by focusing on official news/informations, trivias ecc. Obviously you can also post fanarts, theories and alike but since the goal is to help the wiki, then post things about the wiki. Since we are an encyclopedia, dig up interesting information from the pages, trivias or make spotlights for pages (like featured articles), images, users from the wiki or share the ongoing discussion on the wiki. You can also cover the "fandom" part by posting the links to interesting blog posts for example... anyway, do what you want but think it over before.
 * I can help you with the technical stuff (like widgets and alike) since I've already done it on my wiki.

I think it's important to make the readers interact. As JSD just said, it's a good idea to answer the reader's questions, but don't just stop with that. Ask the reader what they thought of the new chapter or episode. Ask for predictions for the next chapter and inform the reader about the series itself and not only the wiki. This will keep people's attention, I think. 21:58, February 9, 2015 (UTC)

BroOk and I, as the Catalan One Piece Wiki admins, have some experience at administrating a Facebook page. Since this community is huge compared to ours, these advises might not be helpful at all, but here they are:
 * In BroOk’s point of view (which I share), in a community with not so many users like ours there's usually more activity at Facebook than in the wiki itself (about the number of people), so in general users learn about the latest news at Face before reading them at the recent activity. We have also noticed people prefering to comment on Facebook rather than on the wiki's blogs and that some people have learned about the wiki thanks to the page.
 * In my opinion, a Facebook page would help a lot, but don't get desperated if we don't get many likes or comments at first; also the ones who administrate it have to be polite, not extremely serious but not joking all the time either. And finally linking a wiki's page for some reason (appearing recently, being featured, etc) from time to time can be also nice.

So the key is to enjoy while administrating it, not to do it because you have to. 00:13, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

I did some thinking about the youtube channel and maybe we could use it to upload trailers for upcoming releases related to One Piece like official game clips or Funimation's trailer. That might get us some attention. 04:20, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

@AuroraOfDeath: those things are fine, but literally EVERYBODY is doing that. So why people should like our FB page if it's the same as every other else? My point is, make them interact with the wiki. Ask them what they think about the recent blog post user XXXX posted, ask them which article they think it should be featured or what they think about one, ask them what they think about a discussion going on, things like that. Posts like "did you know" should work well too, I made a series of posts about trivia facts that was well appreciated for example.

@Videogamep: Good luck with that, because if you post official stuff, there is a good chance that it will be taken down. A YT channel would work the best for a wiki if, in my opinion, you actually intend to integrate some of those videos in the wiki (some wikis are doing that for example, basically using the channel as video library). But what can we make use of in this wiki? Maybe trailers, songs or episodes... oh wait those things are all copyrighted! And hold on, those are the same things available in the Wikia Video library thanks to its partnerships that we decided to not use! Also keep in mind that a YouTube channel is a lot more work then simply pages.

So much for that idea then. 17:34, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

If people are willing to make it work and put their spare time into running the accounts. I support the idea of using social networks.Besty17 (talk) 17:59, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

That forum was about directly using videos on the wiki. Plus it doesn't have to be official stuff anyway. It could be a Youtube channel for a podcast. Even if we did use official stuff on Youtube it would be covered by Fair Use which Google ignores 100% of the time anyway so that's out. Podcast idea is still in. SeaTerror (talk) 19:46, February 10, 2015 (UTC)

A podcast, "focus on" videos as well weekly series are all feasible ideas, other channels do that for example. The main issues I see with a YouTube channel are: Start with a Facebook page and see how it goes, then maybe you can consider other social network.
 * It require a lot of work and knowledge in video editing, if you want to make reasonable good videos.
 * Who runs it? How do you share, decide and review the work?
 * What does it have to do with the wiki though? In the end it will show the ideas and opinions of the guy who is running it... but then you may as well run your own One Piece channel. What a wiki channel should show?

Maybe it could be a Q&A channel. That's related to the wiki and wouldn't require much editing knowledge. 02:01, February 11, 2015 (UTC)

Gee, it'd be a shame is this discussion were to die, so I guess I'll give an update here. I'm launching a Tumblr campaigne. I'll give y'all a link once I start posting, but right now I'm making it look pretty and professional. Hopefully this will get us some attention for our wiki. People interested in contributing should speak up. 19:41, February 13, 2015 (UTC)

Great. You'll lead all the SJW's from Tumblr here accusing Oda of being sexist. SeaTerror (talk) 19:54, February 13, 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Levi, I think maintaining a YouTube channel would be too much effort for us for now, so let's focus on easier social networking sites now, and later on, if we're successful with them, maybe we can start considering YouTube. But personally, I'm against having a YouTube channel at all.

JSD is now an admin of the Facebook page, so now I guess we just need to know what to do for FB. We'll going to interact with the visitors, but any idea on how? As of now, it looks like the only suggestions are to answer questions, ask them what do they think of the newest episode, chapter, etc. Also, making posts such as "Did you know...?", posting fun trivia, featured characters, etc, are all good ideas.

And an update on tumblr, Ryu and I created a tumblr blog for the wiki, you guys can check it out on here. We'll try to follow the same suggestions brought up for Facebook, but any additional suggestions would be neat.

How about twitter? Should we try twitter now, or for now, stick to just FB and tumblr, and see how they go, then try twitter if they are successful?

If you guys have any more suggestions on what can we do on FB and tumblr, it'd be great to know them. 00:20, February 15, 2015 (UTC)

Not sure about Twitter yet. Seems like we should have a bit more ideas of things to post before we jump into that. 03:18, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

What I think is we should link the Facebook page to the tumblr first I tried doing that with the twitter page a while back. http://tumblr.com/docs/end/facebook this link shows how you do that. Whoever is maintaining tumblr page should do this. 06:43, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

I have linked the facebook page to our twitter account ( http://www.twitter.com/onepiecewikia1 ) so anything that is posted on  facebook will automatically be posted on twitter  and vise versa. This will help us maintain twitter account at the same time, I suggest we do this for tumblr too. 10:29, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

Ideas for things to do with social media
So we need some shit to do with these now that we have them. Here's a section to post ideas. 03:28, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

Complete Redo of Featured Articles
I just had the idea of completely redoing our Category:Featured Articles based on the involvement of Social Media and readers. We haven't touched the editor based poll for several months. And it's been a year since we kept up with it regularly. If we scratch the whole system now and have some polls with major characters (and by polls I mean the simple template so that everyone can be easily involved) we can surely use that our advantage and get some real activity going. We can even do different polls for facebook or tumblr and see which ones get us more draw. In my head, editors choose the options for a week's poll, and readers vote on them, winner becomes a featured article.

What do you guys think? 03:28, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

As one of the few who tried to keep the old polls alive, I think this would be very useful. 17:11, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

While the current featured article system is rather pointless and dysfunctional, I think this should be something else entirely. For featured articles, I'd prefer something like Wikipedia's system that's based on quality and completeness of the articles.

This sounds more like popularity poll type of thing. Maybe it could work as something like "Readers' choice" or "Recommended article". An article would be chosen for a week at a time, then another one would replace it. You could host it after a chapter is released and base the options on the relevant characters. 17:31, February 16, 2015 (UTC)

I really like the idea of using something similar to Wikipedia's system, choosing articles based on quality and completeness, instead of popularity. That being said, we can still use popular articles as long as they're in high quality and are completed, or updated to current events anyway.

I also support scratching the whole system and rebuilding it from scratch, since we'd be able to remove articles in poor quality or in need of referencing, updating, etc. 02:10, February 19, 2015 (UTC)

I also agree that we redo the system. It's pretty pointless to have since nobody uses it anyway. 08:20, February 19, 2015 (UTC)

Well the main purpose of having social nnetworking sites is to promote our site, so things you can do:
 * Featured article/images/users.
 * News about the wiki (forums, discussions, blogs)
 * Ask for feedback. What do you think about this article? Which article do you want to be featured? (you can make a poll for example of a pre-selected candidates)
 * "Spread the knowledge": post trivias, "did you know?" stuff or explain something. We are an encyclopedia after all.

As I said, please be clear on who is managing what. Make a page where you list all the official external sites managed by the community and write who has access to them (even if they are inactive). I didn't checked if you already did that, if so can you link that to me? Also there is a similar page on central, I'll add you there. Also if you want, I can add the widgets to the home page.