LibreOffice social media in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report
We use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Social media
In January 2023, our X (formerly known as Twitter) account @LibreOffice had 53,541 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 62,443. Our most popular tweets were for major releases, but we also tweeted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.
In addition, we focused not only on our own tweets, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice ecosystem and community members. We liked and retweeted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we retweeted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.
On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2023 we worked more on expanding our activities on our account @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 17,632 to 24,987. We also joined Bluesky in 2023 thanks to invites from a community member, with our new account @libreoffice.bsky.social reaching over 150 followers by the end of the year.
Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 60,278 page followers to 63,189. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards newer mobile applications. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.
YouTube channel
Our YouTube channel grew from 18,108 subscribers and 2,886,284 video views in January 2023 to 20,504 subscribers and 3,217,282 video views by the end of the year. The “LibreOffice 7.5: New Features” video (a fantastic production by the Indonesian community) had almost 60,000 views – while the video for LibreOffice 7.6 had over 60,000. We also added videos of talks, presentations and workshops from the LibreOffice Conference 2023.
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Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who continued to produce a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using LibreOffice.