About social media accounts
… this is more or less the same strategy that all EU projects have adopted since the Internet became a thing. The result has been a big digital junkyard of nearly-unused accounts on social media, hosting contracts that expire as soon as the funding does etc. Luce may have a point that it “looks good” when the project is live to the reviewers (depends on the reviewer I guess). Just staying in the fantastic world of CAPS (FP7, so projects that have at least 2 years of mileage already), check out the YouTube account of WebCOSI or the Twitter account of IA4SI (active project). There is even a CAPS project called SciCafe 2.0 that returns broken links.
This does not happen because the people behind those projects are stupid, but because running social media accounts, blogs, websites etc. is hard work. Doing it well on a project that will only live two years is wasteful.
On the other hand, if we did score a resounding success, we would start a spinoff producing care services.
But then again we would probably run into copyright/trademark issue if that spinoff were called OpenCare.
So.
Digital squatting is cheap – good idea to squat everything opencare.
On the other hand, our dedicated social media channels are hard to grow into useful tools. For now, we get much more mileage pushing OpenCare content on the Edgeryders Twitter account than on the OpenCare one. For now, we use the OpenCare one to put out a sort of “corporate” feed about the project, with most of the interaction done through Edgeryders or our personal Twitter accounts. Same thing for Facebook. I predict most of the social media traction will be exerted through the partners, rather than the project.
Twitter followers, Facebook page likesOpenCare | Edgeryders | WeMake | |
---|---|---|---|
134 | 2,915 | 4,420 | |
144 | 3,579 | 1,581 |
When you move beyond FB and Twitter, I do not think it’s worth putting any work at all in keeping OpenCare social media accounts. Our web analytics show that other social networks bring in a negligible amount of traffic. Uploading stuff onto project accounts should be viewed as an admin activity, not a communication activity, and therefore should be kept to a minimum. Low overhead is the way to go.