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). Here's the first tweet, which I think is a good example.
How will this work?
There are a couple of levels to this.
- First, Worldbuilding 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.
Let me add a note here: Please be careful about the posts you suggest for tweeting. Worldbuilding sometimes deals with subjects that are delicate, controversial, or otherwise likely to be problematic for Twitter. While there are two rounds of sorting by human eyes between a suggestion and the Twitter account, we would all prefer that people exercise some common sense and not suggest problematic topics. (I can't really make it less vague than that without loss of generality - sorry!)
Other random notes
- Worldbuilding, specifically, has some specific content that might be worth featuring on the Twitter account, like topic challenges (if we have those, from time to time). This is, of course, in addition to all the awesome questions and answers we could feature.
- Also,
@StackExchange
is occasionally going to be tweeting content along the lines of what we had been thinking about for our own Twitter account. I'm not saying this is going to replace that proposal - and note also that given how much HNQ attention we get, we might not be the site that gets a whole lot of tweets from Stack Exchange - but it's definitely going to overlap. - Finally, I have it on good authority that here may be a Throwback Thursday-style set of tweets each week - so feel free to submit some old posts, as well as new ones!
Whatever happens, @StackExchange
is going to be a great opportunity for us and the rest of the network. What content from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange do you want to see on it?
Addendum, January 2020:
@StackExchange
stopped doing this kind of thing fairly quickly, partly out of a dearth of suggestions (which, I suppose, we could fix. . .) and partly due to a lack of time. That said, as of late 2019, Stack Overflow is doing weekly roundups of interesting questions across the network; you can tweet candidate posts at them using the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows
. We do still have an opportunity here for promoting some our awesome-est posts.