Communication Strategy Filler Using Sections Of Your API Documentation

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Coming up with things creative things to write about regularly on the blog, and on Twitter when you are operating an API is hard. It has taken a lot of discipline to keep posts going up on API Evangelist regularly for the last seven years–totaling almost 3K total stories told so far. I don’t expect every API provider to have the same obsessive compulsive disorder that I do, so I’m always looking for innovative things that they can do to communicate with their API communities–something that Amazon Web Services is always good at providing healthy examples that I feel I can showcase.

One thing the AWS team does on a regular basis is tweeting out links to specific areas of their documentation, that helps users accomplish specific things with AWS APIs. The AWS security team is great at doing this, with recent examples focusing on securing things with the AWS Directory Service, and API Organizations. Each contains a useful description, attractive looking image, and a link to a specific page in the documentation that helps you learn more about what is possible.

I have been pushing myself to make sure all headers, and sub headers in my API documentation have anchors, so that I can not just link to a specific page, but I can link to a specific section, path, or other relevant item within my API documentation. This helps me in my storytelling when I’m looking to reference specific topics, and would help when it comes to tweeting out regular elements across my documentation in tweets. I’m slowly going to push out some of the lower grade tweets of curated news that I push out, and replace with relevant work I do in specific areas of my research–using my own work to fill the cracks over less than exciting things I may come across in the API space.

Tweeting out what is possible with your API, with links to specific sections of your API documentation is something I’m going to add to my API communication research. Providing a common building block that other API providers, or even API service providers can consider when looking for things to fill the cracks in their platform communication strategy. It is simple, useful to API consumers, and is an easy way to keep the Tweet stream regularly flowing, and helping developers understand what is possible. I feel it is also something that should impact how we craft our documentation, as well as our communication strategies, making sure we are publishing with appropriate titles and anchors so we can easily reference and cite the valuable information we are making available across our platforms.