Various Guidance

Communications

Various Guidance

---

Contents of this page:

• Lesson Announcements
• Future Promotion
• Scheduling with Buffer
• Usernames

---

This page offers guidance on how to navigate the various documents supporting our social media workflow, which can be found in the shared Social Media Documentation Google Folder.

Further information available on the Posting Schedule Wiki page.

Lesson Announcements

Part of our Checklist Comment asks us to prepare announcement posts to advertise the publication of a new lesson. The templates for these can be found on this page of the Wiki, as well as in the new-lesson-announcements spreadsheet of the Google Folder.

We prepare two posts:

• one to be posted immediately upon publication
• one to be scheduled for ~21 days later

Two versions of each post must be drafted: one with the Bluesky usernames, the other with the Mastodon usernames. If these are unknown or unavailable, we simply write the Full Name.

We prepare these posts at the handover to Phase 7 and log them in the new-lesson-announcements spreadsheet until they are ready to be posted or scheduled. Currently, only the Publishing Manager (Anisa) and Publishing Assistant (Charlotte) have 'editor' access to this spreadsheet.

Evergreen Posts

One of Programming Historian's social media goals is to regularly promote lessons from our directory, in order to reinvigorate readership after publication.

We do this by asking the Managing Editor to prepare two 'evergreen' posts giving a brief hook for the lesson, which we log into two Google Sheets:

• in ph-evergeens-bluesky, we use the Bluesky usernames (or Full Name if unavailable)
• in ph-evergreens-mastodon, we use the Mastodon usernames (or Full Name if unavailable)

All four Managing Editors as well as the Publishing Manager (Anisa) and Publishing Assistant (Charlotte) have 'editor' access to these spreadsheets.

The term "evergreen" suggests these posts should be shareable at any time, even months or years after publication. This means that they should not make any temporal references such as "new", "recently published", "now available", etc. We'd really like to tag the authors/translators as often as possible, so it's helpful to structure the post in a way that includes their names. Importantly, Bluesky has a 340 character limit: because we also include the DOI (~40 characters) and ideally one or two names (~15-30 characters), this only leaves around 250 characters for the actual content of the post. A number of usernames currently used in the evergreen spreadsheets are old Twitter usernames. It’s important to check them against the username log and to update them to Bluesky/Mastodon wherever necessary. Although MEs are asked to draft the posts during the Checklist Comment phase, this is often missed out. It can be necessary to chase up and send MEs a batch to draft at once. This Bluesky character counter tool is useful for drafting posts within the character limit.

Scheduling with Buffer

We go through a third-party platform called Buffer, using the publishing.assistant [@] programminghistorian.org address.

1. Click on the relevant channel tab on the left of the homepage. If posting across both channels at once, click 'All channels'. You'll then be able to customise the post for each channel (e.g. usernames).
2. Click the bright blue button to Create Post.
3. Enter the content in the text box. You can select an image from any links included to display under the text.
4. Click on the dropdown next to Add to Queue and select Schedule Post.
5. Choose a date and time, and click Schedule!

Usernames

We also keep a spreadsheet named username-log, in which we record the Bluesky and Mastodon usernames of our Project Team members and our Contributors, to use as a reference when drafting new tweets in the future. This spreadsheet now also contains all Project Team email addresses.