# why social media is important for our projects:

## Introduction

As developers, sometimes we focus too much on writing code and too little in community. However, open source is about more than that. It is about communicating, teaching and collaborating. Hence community outreach and engagement are a very important part of open source projects. Nowadays, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are a big part of people's lives and as time passes by, communications change and people learn and collaborate differently. In order to stay connected, we should use social media to share our content and interact directly with users and developers. This helps us diversify our community and stay in touch with more people that are interested in contributing.

## communication

matplotlib: Highest engagement is on posts that show features - new and old. Short pictures and images grab folks. It's especially useful for things that may seem obvious to library developers. For example, great numbers on a tweet demoing intersphinx, which is used across projects.
Proactively engaging with and signal boosting what community members have done has also created a postive virtual feedback cycle where folks share more of what they've done that we can reshare. This provides a very low friction way to show the wider community the flexibility of the library, and has been especially helpful for domains that are unfamiliar to the core contributors. Also a priority of the library has been to encourage third party packages; we have been using social to promote those packages, which has created a feedback loop where folks inform us of their packages, which we then often request them to formally tell us about via our registry mechanisms.
Eta: personally as someone who studies vis, it's totally scicomm for me.

### community engagement

matplotlib: Two of our most popular recentish features - subplot mosaic and cheatsheets - came from interactions on social, as did lots of smaller features and improvements to the documentation are also a consequence of social media interactions. Social media is a great low friction way to reach users who may not proactively engage us, and to get qualitative feedback on what is not working from a much larger population than frequently answers surveys. We also have contributors who came from social media and basically everyone at our last couple of new contributor meetings found out about them through twitter. Social has also been a good way of reengaging currently inactive contributors; contributors who have not been active on github in years engage with posts and sometimes reengage with the library. We've been able to foster a colloborative community on social where expert users and contributors, former and current, frequently help newcomers with their questions.

### branding/optics

matplotlib: Our core developer team skews heavily STEM academic, so our social media policy is a kind of aggressive attempt to reach out to folks who might be alienated by that culture. The language is intentionally casual and not overly proofread or quadruple checked because it is trying to create a safe space where folks who are new to programming or Scientific Python or matplotlib feel comfortable interacting with us. We share content that matches the mission statement and values of the project, largely to signal to people from under represented and minoritized groups that we are willing to back our statements. We try to engage with frustrated users with empathy and understanding to show that the project culture is responsive, and we signal boost work by active contributors to show appreciation and recognition.

## Some key ideas

- Using social media for announcements related to the projects is more inclusive since this might be the only way a lot of people can find out about these things. (Not everyone is on GitHub)
- A very important part of open source projects is letting people know they exist and what they can do. Social media can be a great awareness tool, specially for smaller projects. If we want our tools to be useful, we need to make sure that we help people be aware of them.