As of late yesterday, Stack Exchange has revived its official Twitter account, @StackExchange. It had been used intermittently/actually-not-at-all for several years, but now it's being resuscitated for the express purpose of promoting awesome content around the network. As a Community Manager put it, here's what they're looking for:
- Awesome/interesting/fun Questions & Answers
We'll feature a few of these per week and try to make sure that they're representative of a broad collection of our sites. This includes notable meta posts, too - though I'm guessing they'll be infrequent.- Site events/contests
If a site has a regular or one-off event, we may be able to tweet about some of them. Some of y'all do events throughout the year and we'd love to share some of the community-led fun.- Users who do noteworthy work or meet celebratory rep levels
We won't Tweet about anyone without reaching out to them first... but if there's someone you think deserves (and would appreciate) a spotlight on what they've been doing, either on main and/or meta, let us know.
They're looking for great posts both young and old - I have word that a "Throwback Thursday" of sorts is in the works - and given that people here have written some phenomenal stuff over the years, we definitely have lots to choose from (as well as plenty of new stuff, too).
How will this work?
There are a couple of levels to this.
- First, Astronomy users will write an answer to this question with a link to the content and a short blurb about why it should be tweeted out to 17,640 people and counting.
- Periodically (probably more regularly than I expect), the mods will go through and look at submissions. If we see stuff that looks good - and I bet that there will be lots of that - we'll forward that to the Community Team via super-secret backchannels.
- A Community Manager will manually select posts to be tweeted.
This shouldn't be much of an issue on Astronomy, but please do be careful with what posts you suggest. Possible tweetable content will go through two rounds of manual pruning, so objectionable posts will not make their way to the rest of the Internets, but still, this is Twitter. From time to time, it can be as dangerous as a $\sim1.39M_{\odot}$ white dwarf.
Other random notes
I think the new Twitter efforts are a way to do something I've been wanting for over four years: promote awesome, non-clickbait-y, non-Hot-Network-Questions-List material from small sites that otherwise wouldn't get attention. That can be huge for us, a (relatively) small but still quite healthy site.
Also, I think it could be a vehicle to help our blog posts gain some more visibility. We've got some really interesting content coming up in the coming months, but looking at the WordPress stats, we're not really reaching anyone. This could be a chance to change that.
Whatever happens, @StackExchange is going to be a great opportunity for us and the rest of the network. What content from Astronomy Stack Exchange do you want to see on it?
