A few weeks ago, I heard a tip for writing email subject lines that made me equal parts excited and annoyed. Excited because it works. Annoyed because it’s so obvious in hindsight.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I’m sharing the simple shift that can make your library emails more compelling and more likely to get opened!
Plus, the first kudos of the new year go to an academic library that managed to poke fun at AI and highlight the staff’s human expertise.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
If you’ve spent any time in the library marketing space, you are likely to know John Jackson. John is head of Outreach and Engagement at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. His love of libraries started with his mother’s volunteer work.
“My mother volunteered in a small church library in Florida,” recalls John. “As a child, I often spent my weekends helping build book displays or checking out materials to patrons. I knew about OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and bib records before the age of 12.”
“One of my favorite memories from that time is traveling with my mom annually to attend a regional conference for church librarians. We’d pack up a U-Haul full of library display materials and then recreate those displays at the conference.”
John landed a job with Loyola Marymount in 2015. The private R2 university has approximately 10,000 students, including those pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees. John says the university has a central marketing and communication unit, with employees who cover all areas of external relations work, including photography, graphic design, social media, and licensing.
“At the library, the outreach team is comprised of three full-time employees: me, a student engagement librarian, and an event manager,” explains John. “We also have part-time student employees who assist with various aspects of our programming and outreach work.”
“The library’s marketing support currently consists of me, a student graphic designer, a student social media assistant, and a student videographer. I should note here that marketing is only a portion of my job. Like most librarians, I wear many hats, including collection development, research support, and faculty liaison responsibilities.”
I reached out to John after seeing one of the videos from the Library Fans series, produced by his library. Links to the full series are at the end of this post.
John says the idea came from a presentation on empathy-centered storytelling at the 2023 Library Marketing and Communications Conference and from the videos produced by the Los Angeles Public Library.
“I wanted to create a series that told true stories of library users and did so using high-quality video production,” explains John. “My goal was to promote the individual ways that students from diverse backgrounds (e.g., undergraduate, graduate, commuter, transfer, first-generation, parents) use the library in their day-to-day lives on campus.”
“I also wanted to show, as a proof of concept, that high-quality video production was worth the investment of time and resources. This was also a way to celebrate and recognize some of our hardcore library users: the folks we see regularly in the building every day.”
-John Jackson
John says his team worked on the video series over one semester. They recruited students who were heavy users of the library and familiar faces in the building. They also asked library staff to solicit nominations.
“Our student videographer, John Mac Menamie, is an amazing cameraman and (thankfully for us) owned all his own equipment,” says John. “We were incredibly lucky to hire him onto our team when he was a first-year student, and it’s been amazing to watch his skill set grow over the years.”
“For each of the shoots, we preselected the location so our videographer could spend a few minutes setting up the camera and lighting before the ‘Library Fan’ arrived. We sent prompts and guiding questions to our interviewees in advance to give them an idea of how the conversation would go, but we did not write a script for each interview.”
John used a trick that journalists often employ. He spent the first five to 10 minutes of the interview in small talk with his subject to help them feel more at ease. John says filming usually takes only 10 to 15 minutes. Then, depending on what the interviewee said, John and the videographer needed to shoot footage, known as B-roll, to match the narrative and cover the edits.
Once the videos are edited, John shares them on Instagram, knowing it is the preferred platform for his students. But he’s also taking this opportunity to experiment on other platforms, like YouTube.
“We know from sources like Pew Research Center that usage of YouTube exceeds all other platforms among traditionally aged college students and in the next generation of 14–17-year-olds,” declares John. “So, I’m hoping to build up our content library there. We already have hundreds of tutorials and event recordings on YouTube, but the Library Fans videos are our first attempts at short form on the platform.”
“Most academic libraries are not breaking records when it comes to social media. We’re not likely to ever be the next Milwaukee Public Library. Because our primary target audience (currently enrolled students) is limited and has a churn rate of more than 25 percent every year at graduation, our socials will not grow over time. So traditional growth metrics like followers, likes, and view counts don’t mean as much to me.”
“I tend to focus on the metrics like watch time, sentiment analysis of comments, and sends or reach. Those are the measures that will answer the question, ‘Did this hit right?’”
-John Jackson
“If I want to get the word out about the library, I rely on email marketing. But if I want to ‘set the vibe’ for the library among our students, Instagram, and in particular Reels, is where I spend my time.”
The library’s videos have performed exceptionally well. As of mid-May, the series has received more than 13,000 views, accounting for 26 hours of watch time. That’s incredible! Now, John has plans to use some of the video content for other promotions.
“Because these videos are already so short, I haven’t been pulling soundbites for stand-alone marketing assets,” explains John. “However, I expect I’ll be using pieces of these videos in future promotional videos: New student orientation videos, for example.”
John says his first piece of advice for any library looking to replicate his success is to buy its own equipment.
“Our videographer graduates this year, and with him goes the camera he used to make these videos,” laments John. “I should have done that from the start, and now I am in the unfortunate situation of having to find funding for our own equipment before the next school year begins.”
John finds inspiration for his work from many different organizations.
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How exactly do you market to a niche audience? I have a viewer who wrote that they work for a particular kind of library and want some help with marketing advice. And I think this advice actually applies to everyone working in library marketing.
So, we’re going to get into niche audiences in this episode of The Library Marketing Show!
Plus, kudos go to a library that introduced a new staff member to the media.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here. Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog, and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address. Then, click the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
In a few weeks, kids in your community will head back to school. This time of year is a marketing opportunity for all libraries! Lucky for us, one of the major social media platforms just published a guide for marketing to back to school. I’ll share the top three takeaways for library marketing during back-to-school time in this episode.
Plus we’ll share kudos for a library that did something extraordinary by harnessing the power of their loyal library fans.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here. And thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
Instagram has made four major changes to its algorithm! One of these changes might be a deal-breaker for your library, especially if you are a team of one person. We’ll unpack the four new things you’ll have to keep in mind when posting to Instagram and how those changes impact the work of your library marketing in this episode.
Plus we’ll give kudos today to a library that won’t have to worry about changing their Instagram strategy because they’re already following best practices for one of these four new Instagram algorithm changes.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here. And thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
In college at the Catholic University of America, she interned for then-Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton while also working at the campus library.
“I was interning for her during a summer when the Democratic National Convention was held,” explained Meghan. “It was organized chaos. That summer taught me that I MUCH preferred library work over politics,”
Library work runs in the family. Meghan’s father was the librarian at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, where the family eventually settled.
“I can’t ever remember not loving or being aware of the power of libraries,” said Meghan. “When we lived in Florida, the branch library for our area was a few streets away from our neighborhood. It was the one place outside our neighborhood I was allowed to bike to by myself. I would go, peruse the shelves (usually for a new Laurelene McDaniel book), and come home with my reads for the week.”
Meghan now works as the Outreach and Reference librarian for The University of the District of Columbia. She loves connecting people to the information they are interested in or need. And she loves what she learns from the students and faculty during her interactions.
When Meghan started her job four years ago, her position was brand new. So, she conducted a SWOT analysis to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that her library faces. During the process, she uncovered an amazing angle for library promotion.
“I used a series of formal and informal interviews, space assessment, and document review to get a handle on what people thought about the library,” explained Meghan. “From there, I realized that we had a great brand image as being ‘The Helpful Place.’ Time after time, I learned that people went to the library for help because they knew someone would always be there.”
“Even if the library couldn’t help (for example, with a financial aid problem) at least we tried or would direct them to someone who could assist. I leaned into that to reinforce our already positive customer service experience while slowly building our platforms.”
Meghan also set about getting her fellow staff and faculty trained to provide great customer service to their students.
“During my first summer here, I created a customer service commitment document and general training workshop,” said Meghan. “This gets reinforced twice a year during our required departmental events. I’ve covered everything from customer service basics to remote customer service to accessible service to how to deal with students who already have too much going on.”
Meghan’s university is an HBCU (Historically black college or university) and a commuter campus. Their students are non-traditional. Those facts about her target audience inform everything Meghan does to promote her library.
“They have so much going on already,” said Meghan. “I don’t want ‘dealing with the library’ to be another hurdle they have to jump. So, we work on equity and consistency in our service. We are going to focus on the individual in front of us and work with them in a manner that best suits them as a person.”
“In the end, all the outreach I do comes down to one simple message – we are the place you can come to get help. It doesn’t matter if I’m sending an email, tabling at an event, teaching a class, or just chatting with someone – I want them to walk away remembering that the library is where they can come for help.”
Meghan’s focus on reinforcing the library’s reputation as a place where students can get good customer service was well-received and supported by staff and faculty.
“I approached this from a fait accompli standpoint,” explained Meghan. “It’s integrated into something we ALL do. I reinforce it by sharing positive feedback whenever we get it. I also framed it from the beginning as ‘This is something you are already doing.’ My work is just reinforcing that positive attitude and training on the nuances.”
Meghan admits that it is hard to measure the impact of good customer service. Reviews, polls, and occasional surveys of the library are all positive. The library also sees a lot of repeat customers.
“If I focused too much on basic metrics, I might cry,” declared Meghan. “Instead, I see our outreach as relationship building. If you make a student happy, they will talk about you with your friends.”
“That is why customer service is so important. You can help someone, but if you do it in an off-putting way, that person will never come back. You can also be unsuccessful in solving someone’s issue but, if you are friendly about it, that person comes back because they liked the experience and at least you tried.”
“It’s basically designed to juice your creative side to find content ideas when your brain is tired,” explained Meghan. “We don’t have to work alone! The one great thing about librarians is that we are all so willing to share.”
Meghan has one great trick for catching those fleeting moments of inspiration.
“I keep a note in my phone where I can brain dump things whenever the inspiration strikes,” explained Meghan. “Once a week, I sit down with that note and process things out to make sure I can actually do something with them.”
“Also, never discount the phrase, ‘I don’t know. Let’s find out together.’ For our students that shows that research is a process, and we are all working on it. It can also model that failure is okay. Resilience in research is a key skill. When our students see that even librarians have to keep trying, it helps.”
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Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
When Julia Pitts walks into a library or flips open a newly checked-out book, she remembers her grandmother, Velma.
A frugal woman who grew up in the Great Depression, Velma embedded Julia with her a few lifelong habits, including frequenting the library for its free entertainment.
“With eerie clarity, I can picture her tiny body reading a hardcover crime novel wrapped in the plastic library sheathing under the glow of her lima bean green table lamp,” recalled Julia.
Julia Pitts and her grandmother Velma
Today, that lamp sits in Julia’s office at the W. Frank Steely Library on the campus of Northern Kentucky University, where she serves as Communications and Marketing Manager. Before taking the job at NKU, Julia was a freelance marketer. But after four years of feeling like she was always on the clock, she was ready for a change.
“The idea of working on a college campus where the target audience is primarily young adults actively working to create a better future for themselves excited me,” remembered Julia. “After all, what group of people could be more fun to market to than college students? Better yet, I could use my skills to share the work of a library, an institution designed to empower its patrons with free access to life-changing resources and services. It truly felt meant to be.”
The Steely Library Instagram account is a favorite of mine. Julia says the platform is where she focuses most of her content creation energy, and for good reason.
“From a strategic standpoint, it is where the most significant chunk of our primary target audience (students) prefers to consume their content,” she explained. “Additionally, Instagram is where the majority of NKU’s other social media accounts are the most active.”
“Steely and a handful of other NKU accounts have created a bit of an unofficial influencer circle. We tag and share each other’s posts on stories, increasing the visibility across the campus of NKU’s services, resources, and events. After all, we aren’t competitors and are working towards the same goal; student success.”
“On a personal note, Instagram is my favorite platform. It is where I feel like I can best humanize the library through visual and written storytelling, speaking in a voice that resonates with students, capitalizing on visual elements, and creating fun mini-digital user experiences to engage with our audience. It’s where I can let Steely’s hair down and have a little fun.”
In the spring 2022 semester, Steely Library launched a weeklong scavenger hunt-inspired social media campaign. Staff hid six baby dinosaurs, each with their own adorable personality, throughout the library. The goal was to increase Instagram engagement and build awareness about their brand-new makerspace, Stego Studio, named after a 20-foot-long sculpture created by artist Pat Renick.
“Stego is the library’s beloved unofficial mascot,” explained Julia. “The six baby dinosaurs represented Stego’s children, curious wanderers, and patrons of the arts who had gotten lost in the library. If a student found and returned a baby stego, we rewarded them for their heroic efforts.”
Stego, the unofficial mascot of Steely Library
Each day, Steely Library shared a photographic clue along with a brief caption personifying the baby dinos on Instagram. Each baby stego included a small tag redirecting students to the makerspace with a message that read, “Woohoo! You found me! Take me to Stego Studio (Room SL 215) to claim your prize.” The prize for finding one of Stego’s long-lost children consisted of a Stego Studio sticker, an “I found baby stego” keychain, and a certificate to create a project of their choosing (free of charge) in the makerspace.
“To increase the awareness of our campaign and maximize the number of students that could participate, we created a second way to win a prize,” revealed Julia “If students liked, saved, shared, and tagged friends in the campaign launch post, they were entered for a chance to win a study room for a day with a Jimmy John’s catered lunch for them and three friends.”
The idea for the campaign originated with the Board of Student Stakeholders (BOSS), the student library advisory board. Each year, the group receives funds to execute a library improvement project of their choosing.
BOSS’s idea to launch a social media campaign was the perfect opportunity to begin building awareness of the space and demystifying its technology to the student users. “With the makerspace’s off-the-beaten-path location in the library, we knew the campaign needed to contain an element that physically brought students into the space,” explained Julia.
“Once we launched, it did not take long to realize that we were on to something. The first baby stego was found in seven minutes, the second in 30 seconds, and the third in 20 (seconds). Before we launched, I was just hoping that the baby dinos would be found by the end of the day. I was not expecting (or ready for) the high level of interest we received.”
After the third baby stego was found so quickly, Julia knew it was time to go back to the drawing board and shake things up. What started as a simple scavenger hunt promptly pivoted into a trail of clues and challenges rivaling the Amazing Race.
Students formed teams, scouting potential hiding locations, camping out in study rooms to be close to the action, and tracking Julia’s movements once it was revealed that she was the baby stego hider.” One student even planted fake clues to lead other hopeful seekers astray,” remembered Julia. “It was pure chaos, and I loved every minute of it.”
“By the end, it was clear that we had created something that struck a chord with our students and accomplished our goals. Over the week, we saw a 4,381% increase in post interaction and 71 new followers on Instagram. But, more importantly, we introduced Stego Studio and its technology to a highly captive audience.”
When she’s looking for inspiration, Julia turns to other libraries, both academic and public. One of her favorites is the University of Kentucky’s social media accounts. “Their posts are fun, lighthearted, and have a unique tone of voice,” she explained. “I think far too often, libraries fall into the trap of only sharing text-heavy promotional graphics for events and programs. As a result, their feed can come off as impersonal and spammy. UK relies more on intriguing photography to lure its viewers in, and I knew I wanted to do the same.”
And despite the successes she has created at Steely Library, Julia knows 2023 will be a banner year. “The most significant project of my life is projected to launch on January 21…the birth of my first child (eeek!). So, for the first few months of the year, I will be preoccupied with learning and panicking over how to keep a tiny human alive and well. Upon my return, I’d love to start building a team of student content creators or a library marketing fellowship opportunity.”
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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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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 