Annual Report 2019: Social media and video channel
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full very soon.)
Social media
In January 2019, our Twitter account had 22,907 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 28,775. Our most popular tweets were for major releases, but we also produced some campaigns, such as “NO” in August. Accompanying the text “Don’t get trapped by your office suite”, this tweet included an image with a striking “NO” next to “registration, forced payments and vendor lock-in”. The tweet gained over 80,000 impressions, thanks to likes and retweets, while our community translated the graphic.
In April, we joined Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. Fosstodon – a Mastodon server set up specifically for free software projects – kindly accepted our request for an account, so we set up this account and started posting content, often more focused on technical users, compared to our tweets and Facebook posts. By the end of the year, we had over 3,100 followers, and have been engaging with other users who have questions and suggestions.
Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 54,045 page likes to 55,985, and on April 2, Google officially discontinued its Google+ service. We had over 16,000 followers at the time, but that number had gradually been reducing, as most users had been aware for many months that Google was closing the service for personal accounts.
Throughout the year, we investigated tools to automate and enhance our use of social media. For instance, we set up PostPickr to automatically tweet prepared messages and graphics at regular intervals.
YouTube channel
Our YouTube channel grew from 7,231 subscribers and 1,147,772 video views in January 2019 to 9,351 subscribers and 1,544,818 video views by the end of the year. The “LibreOffice 6.2: New Features” video amassed over 100,000 views:
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…while the video for LibreOffice 6.3 had over 70,000:
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Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who produced a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using Libreoffice.
Thank you
TDF would like to say thank you to the many native language social media groups, organised by local communities that support LibreOffice. They are really helping to spread the word around the globe.
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