Angela Hursh leads an outstanding team of marketing and training professionals at NoveList, a company dedicated to helping libraries reach readers. A 2023 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, she has also created courses on LearnwithNoveList.com designed to help library staff learn how to create effective marketing. Before her job at NoveList, Angela led the content marketing team for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. She also has more than 20 years of experience as an Emmy-award-winning broadcast TV journalist.
In this episode, we have the top three social media headlines. There are huge changes coming to the Facebook algorithm (again!) plus a new feature on Instagram and why you might want to rethink your library’s YouTube strategy. What does this all mean for libraries? We’ll dive in.
Kudos in this episode go to the Lexington Public Library. Watch the video to find out why they’re being recognized.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
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Photo courtesy Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
My favorite bedtime snack is cereal. There’s something comforting about climbing into bed to watch TikTok while munching on Cheerios or Rice Krispies or, God forgive me, Cookie Crisp.
But it costs a lot more now to indulge in my favorite nighttime ritual. The average price of a gallon of milk rose by $1.23 between 2020 and 2022. The price of an average box of dry cereal rose by $1 between 2020 and 2022, according to my research.
Everything is getting more expensive, and not just in the United States. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, consumer prices are up 9.2 percent in 2022. Some countries like Turkey and Estonia are seeing double-digit inflation rates.
Your patrons are struggling, as I’m sure you know. That’s why now is the moment to start promoting your library as a money-saving opportunity for your community.
This isn’t a new idea. During the recession of 2008, libraries marketed themselves as a place for free books, DVDs, education, and entertainment. We’ve expanded our services since then, and we can show our community the value of using their library card to save money.
This approach has benefits for the library too. It will help reconnect community members who may have stopped coming to the library during the pandemic. That will drive circulation, visitors, and attendance.
Specificity is key.
Libraries, in our well-intentioned effort to appeal to everyone, often appeal to no one. So instead of saying, “The library saves you money,” be specific.
Think about the audiences you have on the platforms where you promote your library. Your Facebook followers have a specific demographic makeup. So do your Instagram followers. Your email newsletter subscribers react positively to certain promotions.
Think about those specific audiences. Write down what you know about them. For example:
Our library’s Instagram audience is women between the ages of 25 and 34. We get the most likes, shares, and comments for posts featuring historic photos of our library and book recommendations.
Next, do some research about the financial state of your area. Census statistics from 2020 are a great place to start. You can also search local news articles for more recent reports from your city or county about the state of the economy in your service area. If I were to do this for the city where I live (Cincinnati, Ohio), I would write:
The average household income according to the 2020 census is $65,000 and the poverty rate is 24 percent. Our population is majority white (50 percent) and black (41 percent). Cincinnati was ranked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the bottom ten urban areas for job growth. The homeownership rate is only 39 percent. Most households consist of three people. Most residents have at least a high school diploma.
Armed with just those few statistics, I can make a list of the needs my service community has.
Finding a job
Career growth for better-paying jobs
Adult education advancement and the money to pay for higher education
Family activities that are cheap or free
Entertainment that is cheap or free
Now I can identify the specific library services that fall into those categories. Then, I can make plans to promote each of those library offerings as cost savings to my community.
Here are five ideas for specific promotions. Scroll down to the bottom of the post for examples of libraries that are promoting their services to save money.
Include a price comparison.
How much does a subscription to Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, or Audible cost compared with your library’s free streaming movies and music? How much does it cost to rent a workspace compared to using the library as a remote workspace? How much does it cost to buy a folding table versus checking one out from your library of things? Make the comparison so community members can see how much money they can save.
Always start with your collection.
Books are your library’s brand. In your print collection, focus on bestselling fiction and nonfiction, cookbooks, DIY, and children’s books. If you’re worried about growing the holds list, be sure to promote these books in all formats, including digital and audio, to give your patrons access faster.
You should also promote your library’s digital magazines and online newspapers. Remember to do a price comparison to show people how much they can save by using your library.
Remember, don’t promote the entirety of your collection. Be specific. Pick one to three titles that match a specific target audience. Your promotions will be more effective.
For example, when I worked at the Cincinnati Library, I promoted Reminisce Magazine to baby boomers on Facebook. Before our promotion, we had only a few downloads of this magazine each month. Afterward, downloads rose by more than 100 percent! Our community also really loved Cincinnati Magazine and whenever I marketed it by itself, downloads spiked. Specificity is the key.
Consumer reports database
This is a huge money saver for your community. Show your fans how they can research the best products and save time and money.
Homework help
Tutoring isn’t cheap. Many libraries offer help for kids struggling with schoolwork, either in person or online. If your homework help is in-person, introduce people to the faces their kids will see at the library. The Cincinnati Library did this in a blog post. You can also make a short video or a series of slides on Instagram or Facebook stores.
Other library services that save money
Library of things
Free Wi-Fi hotspots
Video games
Free or cheap classes and testing preparation.
The library as a workspace
Real-life examples of libraries promoting their cost-savings
Explore the value of your library membership! A $25.00 annual family membership can save you over $1600 a year! Sign up today online at: https://t.co/cTRw0mtWTW
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In this episode, we’ll answer a question from a viewer. They wanted to know how to tell which of their promotions are working. It’s sometimes tricky work trying to figure out where people are learning about your library’s services and collection. I’ll share three strategies to help you figure out what is working… and what isn’t!
Kudos in this episode go to the Baytown Library. Watch the video to find out why they’re being recognized.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page.
He’s seeing great success with this approach. Says Ned, “Using these guidelines we’ve increased our Instagram reach by 1149% in 12 months. This stuff really works!” Ned kindly granted permission to reblog his post here.
The caveat
This is an internal doc. It’s literally just the guidance I wrote for the York staff who help me do the Instagram. So that means it’s not a definitive all-encompassing guide! There are probably things we’ve talked about internally that everyone knows, so it’s not codified here.
Also, we’re an academic library so it may be skewed towards that sector. Generally speaking though, I think pretty much everything here is applicable to any non-profits using Instagram.
Another small caveat is, that I’m not trying to present York’s Insta as the finished article, the account to which everyone should aspire. We’re still learning, still improving, and still trying to increase our reach. We don’t nail everything, we still post things people don’t respond to. We’re a work in progress, and this post is really about how to make that progress happen.
The context
Our Instagram was created in 2016 by a Comms Team rather than by us in the library. We finally got control of it ourselves in mid-2017. From that point on it went okay, gradually building up followers and levels of engagement but not setting the world on fire.
From the time the pandemic started, I spent much more time actively involved in social media rather than just writing the guidelines, and our Instagram use increased accordingly. We posted a lot more to the Grid, essentially tried harder, and, frankly, started to do more of the things I was always telling other libraries to do in social media workshops. It worked well, but it was still very much in the shade of our Twitter account, and not quite hitting the heights we wanted.
Exactly a year ago, I decided that we needed to invest more time in Instagram and make it work better.
Instagram is absolutely essential for reaching undergrads
It is THE communication channel on which to get messages to undergraduates, nothing else comes close. Our Twitter was doing really well and was where we put the most time, and all that time paid off with lots of growth and engagement. But I did some follower analysis and, at least among those who engaged by replying and quote-tweeting us, it was clear that our audience there primarily consisted of PostGrads, Researchers, and Academics. So our key social media messages were not getting through to UGs. Insta is the answer to that problem.
In 2021 I co-presented at an event with Liverpool Uni Library, whose social media really is something of a gold standard in academic libraries. Before the event we chatted on zoom – they had grown their Instagram massively in recent times, which made me think perhaps we could do the same. So I asked my colleague Rebecca Connolly to go on a little fact-finding mission and check out Liverpool, Glasgow and other university libraries with good Instagram engagement went about their business and what we could learn. Rebecca produced a brilliant report and we set to work on transforming our Insta into something much more effective for getting key messages out to undergrads in particular – a process that is still ongoing.
How we changed our Instagram
Some things we tweaked right away, like following more York-based accounts and using Stories a lot more. Using Stories is key and I really feel like it was something I didn’t understand well enough before Rebecca became involved with the account at York. She is an essential part of the progress we’ve made. Stories are so good for newsy items, and the more success you have with Stories the better things seem to go on the Grid too.
Other things evolved over time, like avoiding the use of words and graphics on the grid (only using them on Stories), and making sure to pair big announcements in the captions (NOT the picture) with visually arresting pictures of the library.
If you’ve not read the guidance doc linked at the top of this post, have a look – we basically did all the things in that document! In addition to all that, we’ve created and posted a lot more Reels (you can see all our Reels videos here), and also tried some fancy split photography, that involves dividing a wide-angle shot up into even squares so it can be seamlessly swiped through. Here’s an example that I posted that I really like…
With any kind of social media, I’m always looking for engagement rather than follower numbers. I want more followers of course – a larger audience of students and staff for our key messages. But they come naturally as a by-product of posting stuff that gets engagement. So for Instagram, I’m looking at Likes, Comments, Shares, and Reach, and hoping that if we increase those our followers will increase at the same time.
As it happens, our followers have increased by about a thousand people in the last twelve months. That’s great. More excitingly for me, is that the number of Likes has gone up 42 percent, despite us posting slightly less frequently overall. So the likes Per post has actually gone up 69 percent – meaning we’re posting stuff the students actually respond to, more of the time. Over 2 years, our total number of Likes hasincreased by over 350 percent.
Shares are way up, and Comments also increased which is great because we want that interaction and chance to answer questions – up by more than 600 percent over the two years.
What isn’t captured by the analytics is the amount of DMs we’ve had – either just messages out of the blue or responses to questions in our Stories. I can’t get figures on this without manually counting but the increase is huge. People love feedback one-to-one on Instagram.
The reach is the thing that most amazed me though – an increase of over 1000 percent in the 12 months is just fantastic.And the reason is that if people don’t Like your posts, Instagram doesn’t share them widely. So now that we’re posting content that gets engagement, a much higher proportion of our followers are seeing our posts. This means our key messages are reaching more undergraduates, and that was the whole aim of this focused attempt to increase engagement.
Like with all social media, the key thing is to learn what your particular community responds best to, and do more of it.
Ned Potter
Finally, do check out Liverpool, they’re so good
So that’s it! There was a lot to get through in this post; if you’ve made it this far, I salute you. I hope people find these guidelines useful, and if you have any questions leave me a comment below.
I’ll leave you with a recommendation to look at Uni of Liverpool Library’s Instagram account – however good our numbers are I know theirs will be astronomically better! They’re really good at this stuff, and you’ll find them @livunilibrary.
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The Library Marketing Show, Episode 146: In this episode, we’ll answer a question from a viewer.
They want to know how far in advance to start promoting their library programs on social media. I’ll share some tips to help you find the “sweet spot” for your library audience.
Kudos in this episode go to the Ann Arbor Public Library. Watch the video to see why they’re being recognized.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
Libraries know the power of storytelling. Most of us are literally and physically surrounded by some of the best stories in the world.
But the quest for library stories that have emotion and a compelling story arch is daunting for many libraries. A Kentucky librarian has the solution: let your patrons tell their own stories!
Levi Simonton has worked for the Jessamine County Public Library for three and a half years and is now the library’s social media coordinator. “I love this place,” said Levi when I asked him about his work experience.
In January, Levi and his library launched a video series called Share A Story. The videos were created to amplify the voices of library superfans.
Levi’s library believes that patrons’ real-life experience is the best way to increase the use of the library and relay the library’s value. “We think that a community member is more likely to visit the library after hearing a story from one of their peers rather than seeing an advertisement from us,” explains Levi.
Approaching a patron and asking them to share their story is often intimidating for libraries. But Levi has a remarkably simple approach. “We typically ask other staff members if they know anyone who might be willing to share an impactful story with the library,” says Levi. “We may also ask for patrons with experience on a specific topic we plan to promote. Sometimes it’s a bit more serendipitous, though. We met the first patron we interviewed by chance at our big comic con event last October.”
The interview itself doesn’t take much time, according to Levi. He typically spends about 45 minutes interviewing his subject. Then he focuses on getting footage of the subject that matches what the patron talked about (in the TV world, this is called B-roll). The footage is used later in editing, to cover parts of soundbites and edits. It also makes the video more interesting.
Once the interview and footage are shot, it’s time to put it all together. For Levi, this is the most labor-intensive part of the process. “These particular pieces usually take 10-15 hours over a week or two,” recalls Levi. “Honestly, that’s longer than it should take. I’m just new to video editing and have a bit of compulsive behavior when it comes to getting those darn details right.”
When the library launched the first video, the reaction was positive, both from patrons and staff. “We showed the videos at a recent staff meeting,” says Levi. “They seemed to resonate with everyone. Hearing directly from patrons about the library’s impact on their lives brought at least a few staff to tears.”
So far, the library has released three videos in the series, including one from a woman who has been visiting the library since she was a little girl. “I grew up in an environment that was considered impoverished,” says Anna Kenion, who is featured in one of the videos. “However, my way of escape, to solitude time and to dream bigger was when I would go to our public library,”
The library is taking a break from releasing videos over the summer to focus on summer reading. But they are working on videos to promote their new outreach vehicle and children’s storytimes. “We may release podcasts, written pieces, or other media that fall under the Share A Story umbrella in the future,” said Levi.
Is your library telling patron stories as part of your marketing? Let me know in the comments!
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The Library Marketing Show, Episode 145: In this episode, we’ll answer a question from Leica. She says, “I am a one-gal, part-time show here. I can set my priorities easily, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on working with NO goals or strategic plans? I know it sounds crazy, but I’m not given anything to work TOWARD. So, as much as I *think* I do well, I don’t really have any measurable way to verify.”
Kudos in this episode go to the Garland County Library. Watch the video to see why they’re being recognized.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page.
The Library Marketing Show, Episode 144: In this episode, we’ve got our monthly social media headlines, and this month, we’re going to focus exclusively on Instagram. The platform is testing some new features and they could have significant implications for library marketing on the app.
Kudos in this episode go to the Coos Bay Library. Watch the video to find out why they’ve been recognized.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
In my day job, I create and teach professional development courses about library marketing. In a recent class, I asked the learners whether they wanted to learn about podcasts as promotional tools. The answer was loud and clear: “YES!”
Many of these library staffers were fans of podcasts. They understand the power of this medium.
Podcasts are fun, informative, and engaging. Listeners get valuable information and insight delivered in a way that feels intimate.
They’re also incredibly convenient. They show up on your phone when and wherever you want to listen to them–while exercising, while grocery shopping, while driving, while doing chores, and while crunching marketing data for your monthly reports. If you go on vacation, you don’t miss anything.
In my quest for lifelong learning and inspiration, I’ve found a bunch of shows that are really awesome–funny, fun, thoughtful, and well-produced. I subscribe to more than 20 podcasts, and I love them all. (If you want my full playlist, it’s at the bottom of this article).
The following four podcasts are essential for anyone who works in library promotion and who wants to do it well. Listening to these four shows will improve your work, inspire you, and help you feel more connected with the world.
This is a series from one of my favorite experts. And, no surprise, it’s packed with incredible, intriguing stories.
In each episode, Andrew Davis focuses on a famous entrepreneur or business owner… except you don’t know who the famous person is until the very end of the episode.
By listening to this show, I’ve learned new techniques for storytelling and suspense. I’m also inspired by the stories. These are people who have found ways to overcome incredible hurdles. And because Andrew Davis is a marketing expert, his stories usually include a turning point, where his subject makes a marketing or promotional decision that changes their life.
Each episode is just 15 minutes or less. It’s the perfect show to listen to on the way to work.
This show was one of the first podcasts created. John Jantsch has been interviewing marketing experts, authors, and business owners about a vast range of topics including leadership since 2005.
I’ve learned a lot of practical marketing tips from this podcast. But this show is also a great example of how to turn an audio experience into an opportunity to drive more traffic to your website.
Each episode has its own website landing page, which includes a show description that’s packed with searchable keywords. John Jantsch shares his key takeaway, the questions he asked the guests, and a full transcript of the show. He also makes it easy to either listen to the show on the landing page or subscribe on a variety of platforms. And at the bottom of the page, he includes a further call to action to watch more podcasts, download a free resource, or sign up for a newsletter.
Each episode is between 20 and 30 minutes long. It’s another perfect show for your commute.
This show, first released in 2014, is one of my staples. It’s hosted by Anna Sale, and it features stories of celebrities and regular folks talking about the most fundamental of human topics: death, sex, and money.
I’ve learned two big lessons from listening to this podcast. The first is how to interview. Anna Sale is an exemplary listener. That skill naturally allows her to ask deeply thoughtful follow-up questions. I can always tell that she is fully in the moment and present with her interview subjects.
The second lesson is how to offer additional support and resources. For many of her episodes, Sale and her team have created “starter kits.” They include playlists of songs, curated by listeners, to deal with tough subjects or get through challenging times. There are also starter kits for new listeners, featuring the best or most popular episodes, arranged by subject.
Most episodes range in length from 30 to 45 minutes. I usually save them for chore time on weekends. During the pandemic, this show made me feel more connected with the outside world.
Hosted by the incomparable Ira Glass, a staple of NPR, This American Life meshes journalism and storytelling in a seamless and captivating format. It’s a masterclass in storytelling.
From listening to this podcast, I’ve learned how to find extraordinary stories in ordinary settings. Ira Glass and his team often use a technique called “story of self” to introduce a topic. They relate how or why they become interested in this subject. And that, in turn, makes it relatable to their audience.
Like Death, Sex, and Money, I’ve also learned lessons about interviewing from this show. In particular, the team is not afraid of silence when they are interviewing their subjects. They give their interviewees time to think and the audience time to reflect.
This show is a long-form podcast, with episodes lasting around an hour. I listen to this podcast on my walks and the stories are so intriguing and told so expertly that I am always surprised at how fast the time goes.
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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 