Nowadays, almost every brand has a range of accounts on different social media platforms, and we, as tech writers, can’t miss a chance to look into the matter and see for ourselves whether it could be a useful tool for us to promote documentation or not.
Why Would You Need to Promote Your Documentation?
Let’s answer this question first. The answer is fairly simple, actually: it helps you establish and develop the connection between your product and its target audience.
First of all, publicly displaying your – top-quality, we’re sure – documentation makes you look credible and trustworthy as a professional among your clients.
Then, effective promotion ensures that people are, in fact, aware of your documentation’s existence and its significance. You encourage them to use your documentation more actively, and that leads to them using your product better. Or, you could take a kind of proactive approach based on your professional experience and offer the answers and solutions to the most popular users' queries beforehand, increasing user satisfaction and decreasing the load on your technical support.
In short, proper promotion of your docs might improve your professional image, demonstrate the value of your products and help the target audience of your product to enhance their user experience.
Docs to Promote
Bear in mind that we’re talking about the product documentation itself with different content formats based on it. Newsletters, doc-based articles, and such may serve as expert content useful for your current customers and attract new ones. So it’s necessary to coordinate and integrate your documentation team actions with the whole content strategy and marketing efforts of the company and its product first.
Now, let’s highlight the ways you might use to share your documentation with colleagues, users, or other audiences.
- Blog posts containing useful information, professional tips and tricks, industry news, or insights help you raise awareness and engagement levels.
- Detailed reports on pressing problems and solutions show you as an expert.
- Case studies describing your product in use show its real value better than anything.
- User guides and manuals provide in-depth info, answer the most popular user questions, for example, and serve as handy resources for current and future clients, explaining how to use your product properly.
- Newsletters keep your audience updated.
There might be more, depending on your product, of course, but we believe the list above contains the most popular kinds of information you might want to share with your audience.
Social Media Platforms You Should Try
To promote your documentation, you may use the same social media platforms you use to communicate with your target audience, actually. In ClickHelp, we provide you with social media buttons so readers can share your documentation on such media outlets as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- A company blog can be a highly effective tool for promoting your documentation and resource content. It provides your clients with all the necessary information, from the latest news to product updates, shows your expertise, and reaches an organic audience.
Try this: Start a monthly blog series about the top useful features of your software.
- Twitter has more than 300 million monthly active users, which is a really large potential audience. And with the idea of easy sharing and fast promoting information at its core, Twitter can help you reach your audience in a matter of minutes and drive more traffic to your product.
Try this: Twit once or twice a week about your latest updates or improvements, and use relevant hashtags to reach a more targeted audience.
- LinkedIn is a relevant way to promote your documentation to a professional, business-focused community and establish your company’s credibility.
Try this: Survey your clients on which doc area is the best or worst and get actionable insights from them.
- Facebook helps you reach the most relevant audience using its targeting options and boost the most important information through paid promotions. There are also different groups that might be useful for you as a tech writer or be another great place for you to share your docs.
Try this: Complement your info with images, infographics, and such since Facebook users love visual content.
Track Your URLs
That’s rather obvious, but let us remind you that to promote your documentation, you should publish it online first. Just like how it is done in ClickHelp: our user manual is not only extremely helpful but easily accessible and easy to browse.
After that, you may proceed to promote your docs on social media. And when you post external links to drive traffic to your company blog, user manuals, or anything else, it might be helpful to use UTM’s to measure and optimize the effectiveness of each of your platforms. You can apply different codes for each platform, include campaign names, and integrate them with Google Analytics (you didn’t forget to turn GA on in your documentation, did you?). Then you can analyze the results and see for yourself where the most traffic is coming from, which content format is better for each social media platform, determine the effectiveness of different strategies, and so on. The insights you gather from this research might be useful for future promotions.
Conclusion
Social media can promote technical documentation by reaching large relevant audiences, demonstrating expertise, and distributing useful resources valuable to users.
If you use social media strategically and don’t forget analytics, you can drastically improve the connection between your product and its users, enhance their experience, and improve your professional image.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices