Wikimedia Indonesia/Social Media Strategy

Wikimedia Indonesia is one of the largest Wikimedia Foundation affiliates in Asia and the Pacific region. Wikimedia Indonesia supports many Wikimedia projects run by various language groups in Indonesia. In order to reach more people and influence more people to engage with different Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Indonesia tries to maximize its presence in the social media world.

Presentation of social media strategy.

Objective

There are three main objectives Wikimedia Indonesia pursues in this purpose.

1. Wikimedia Indonesia intends to reach as many people as possible in Indonesia and gain more followers through the social media platforms. This will ease the dissemination of information related to Wikimedia Indonesia projects and programmes.
2. By gaining more followers and reaching wider audiences, we expect more participation in Wikimedia projects and agenda, both independently and collectively on occasion such as Wikipedia training or competitions.
3. By employing strategies to enhance the visibility of different Wikimedia projects in our platforms, we believe that people eventually can learn and recognize the brand of Wikimedia and its value as well.

Content

Wikimedia Indonesia creates its own style of communication, encompassing both lingual and visual stylistic. Our written communication emphasizes plain language which uses less technical and complicated terms. We also prioritize the use of multilingual contents to communicate respectfully with different minority language communities across the Indonesian archipelago. The various languages we use in this context mostly are the regional languages that already had its Wikimedia project editions or has a potential group of contributors to release a Wikimedia project in the near future. Along with that, we also produce different contents on regional languages and culture to celebrate the diversity of Indonesia. We usually use their respective design motifs and arts to be incorporated in our social media contents.

Different social media contents we design are classified into two major categories, i.e the primary contents and the secondary contents. The primary contents are directly related to Wikimedia projects, including but not limited to events, competitions, challenges, statistics, and how-to. Meanwhile, the secondary contents are indirectly related to Wikimedia projects that act as hook contents. This type of content is largely in the form of easy-to-read shareable infographics about language, culture, and useful knowledge in general. Every topic is equipped with related links to Wikimedia projects, such as its Wikipedia page. Secondary contents make up most of the content we publish in Wikimedia Indonesia platforms.

The variety of primary contents

• Events: to announce events for Wikipedia training, Wikipedia courses, and contributors meet-ups.
• Competitions: to announce competitions varied to writing competition (Wikipedia), photography competitions (Wikimedia Commons) and proofreading competition (Wikisource)
• Tips and tricks: explain how to use a particular feature in Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects or its rules.
• Statistics: publish data of Wikimedia projects development, such as Wikipedia amount of articles.
• Quizzes: quizzes act just like an ice-breaker to make some fun space in social media. Most of our quizzes have a small fun prize, mainly souvenirs, for the winners.
• Other Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia: as we know that Wikimedia projects are overwhelmingly concentrated on Wikipedia alone, we make sure there is regular space for other underrepresented Wikimedia projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, and Wikibooks.
• Brand Education: focuses on the introduction of various Wikimedia projects and its relations. We also frequently emphasize the differences between Wikimedia and Wikipedia.

The variety of secondary contents

• Listing: listing is a very simple and easy-to-read type of content. As may it sounds, this content lists several items in a topic, such as the variations of Balinese street food, the most popular batik motifs in Indonesia, eight sources of omega-3.
• Local language learning: this type of content focuses mainly on local language learning, such as the prepositions, names of musical instruments, and cardinal directions.
• Introduction to technical/scientific terms: this type focuses on the introduction of technical and scientific terms in Bahasa Indonesia, in comparison to its English or Dutch counterparts.
• Narrative: this type of content is usually longer than any other types of content. It’s rather rich in information and designed with the sense of magazine layout. The topics can be scientific or cultural.
• Timeline: timeline contents explain a related series of events in a period of time, such as the history of a museum.
• Comparison: this type of content compares two or more things, mostly related to languages, such as the comparison of Madurese and Sasak languages about the head parts, the similarities of Javanese and Banjarese words.
• Greetings: greetings play an important part in social media management in Indonesia, where commemorative days, both secular and religious holidays, are widely celebrated.

Lesson learned

Followers growth in three different platforms.

In the past few years conducting such social media strategies, we have several insights that we learnt along the way. Some of them include how we deal with people and contributors and how we read current trends in social media and be able to take advantage of it. In the past two years, we doubled the number of followers on Twitter and Instagram, but the same content faced different responses on Facebook.

Story from the Heart

In September 2019, Wikipedia bahasa Indonesia received repeated vandalism on several politician biography articles in response to political situations happening that time. We decided to create a simple post about how we expect the users and readers of Wikipedia behave and understand the Wikimedia movement. “We are upset with the vandalism in WIkipedia was displayed in a plain white post with two doodles of sad books. The caption is a narrative story about why we should respect Wikipedia as a free storage of all human knowledge. Unexpectedly, this post gained many engagements across platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). In fact, this is actually the highest engaged primary content in Wikimedia Indonesia until this day. There is one lesson we got from this post: simple yet touching messages can stimulate people to create opinions and support towards our movement.

The More The Merrier

Social media network.

In the process of creating and designing posts, we use templates to produce different posts for several languages of Indonesia. This is very efficient since one template can produce different posts scheduled for several different days. Sometimes, this post is also used, reposted, or requested by various communities to enrich their social media content. This also creates a feel of togetherness between different language communities across Indonesia.

Riding the Wave

Following the trend or the phenomenon people are currently talking about is totally okay. Important to note is how we can translate these trends into something related to our movement. Meaning we can take advantage of what people are into in some period of time. The advantages include reaching a wider audience and gaining new followers. Celebrations that are widely celebrated can be anticipated (we can prepare a content before the day). This kind of content is mostly secondary content, meaning that it’s indirectly related to our movement. In order to connect every trend with our movement, we usually encourage people to read and contribute to relevant pages in Wikimedia projects. Riding the wav have contributed significantly to the followers growth of Wikimedia Indonesia’s social media.

Worth to Share, Worth to Adapt

When we are talking about how we ride the wave with certain content ideas, we orient ourselves to two qualities, i.e worth to share and worth to adapt. The more people want to share our contents, the more engagement will take place. It is not only about how common people interact with our content, moreover how other related institutions see the value of our content which makes them interested in adapting our ideas. These ideas are especially formulated to be simple, easy to digest, information rich and rare/unique.