One of the biggest advantages of creating Instagram Reels is that you can share them on Facebook, too. But what happens when that connection suddenly stops working?
A viewer of The Library Marketing Show recently ran into this issue, and after some troubleshooting, we found an easy solution.
In this episode, I share the fix and a few tips to help your library get the most out of its short-form video content.
Plus, kudos go to a library with an expansive new plan to reach young children.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Every once in a while, a social media update comes along that feels like it was built for libraries.
Instagram is currently testing a new feature that could make it easier for users to find content they’re genuinely interested in. And many libraries are already creating the kind of posts that could thrive in this environment.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I explain what’s changing and what it could mean for your social media strategy.
Plus, we’ll give kudos to a library that received press coverage for its new bookmobile!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
More libraries are receiving Instagram collaboration requests. But figuring out which partnerships make sense isn’t always easy.
Some collaborations can expand your reach and strengthen community connections. Others may feel off-brand, unclear, or difficult to evaluate.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I share four questions to help you decide when your library should accept an Instagram collaboration request, how to protect your brand, and how to recognize opportunities that are genuinely worth pursuing.
Plus, a library marketer receives kudos for their work transforming their library’s connection to the community.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
If you’re sharing your Instagram posts to Stories to boost reach, you’re not alone. But it may not be helping you in the way you think!
According to Instagram’s head, this common tactic doesn’t actually increase reach the way many marketers assume.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I break down what’s really happening with the Instagram algorithm, what this means for library marketing, and what you should do instead to make sure your posts are seen and engaged with.
Plus, a kudos nomination comes in for a library that’s busting myths about libraries!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Running social media for a library is challenging. Running it alone is something else entirely.
A viewer recently asked how one person is supposed to handle it all — and it’s a question many library marketers are quietly asking.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I share strategies to help you stay consistent, reduce overwhelm, and focus your efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact.
Plus, we’ll share kudos for a library that received a huge shout-out from a major author in a major magazine.
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 & Hamilton County Public Library
Lauren Tolman learned to read when she was just three years old.
“Books have been part of my life since I was little,” she explains. “My family made weekly trips to our local public library. I tore through Arthur,The Baby-sitters Club, Little House (on the Prairie), and any series I could get my hands on.”
“As a kid, my dream job swung between ‘mermaid’ and ‘librarian.’ The librarians at my local branch sat at this big wooden desk surrounded by paperback spinner racks, and they’d read to kids on carpeted risers. I visited the library again thirty years later… the same desk, the same brown carpet, the same happy library noise.”
Lauren’s first library job was as a shelver. In her 20+ year career, she’s been a page, a story time performer, a clerk, a children’s librarian, and a supervisor. Now, she’s the Communications Specialist in the Marketing Department at Utah Valley University’s Fulton Library.
Lauren and two other staff members market the library to the school’s 47,000 students. Lauren supervises the department full-time and handles project management, social media, and campus outreach. Her work is complemented by a part-time graphic designer and a part-time copywriter.
Lauren says the most effective channel for reaching her audience is Instagram. The library appears to have a formula down that works well for their audience. All the videos are short-form with a healthy dose of humor.
The library is also really, really good at putting its own, unique twist on trends, as they did for this video. (You will remember when this song was all the rage on Instagram and TikTok videos!)
But beyond social media, Lauren and her staff have other ways to reach students on campus.
“Our staff is our best ‘channel,’” shares Lauren. “They talk with students constantly through instruction sessions, resource fairs, research help, circulation desk interactions, etc.”
“Students love seeing other students in marketing. We also work with peer mentors, ambassadors, and other student leaders who help share our posts or pass along information to their programs.”
Recently, Lauren and her team worked through a library campaign refresh with new branding, colors, iconography, and more, called “Find It at the Fulton Library.”
“We aim for a new brand campaign every 3-4 years to keep our image fresh and current for our students,” explains Lauren. “The process can take 6-9 months, as we work with our campus marketing, communications, and photography departments to produce all the materials.”
“They help us with concepts and developing a brand kit with colors, fonts, and more to help maintain a consistent look among all of our deliverables. They also help us with student lifestyle photoshoots, giving us a high-quality photo library to use throughout the next couple of years.”
As you can see, this new brand has a vintage feel, while being fresh and colorful.
But not everything is all fun and games for an academic library looking for promotional success. Like most library marketers, there have been times when the strategiesy Lauren has tried just didn’t land with her audience.
“I will say I’ve had many disappointments where social media posts or Reels get low engagement,” explains Lauren. “It always seems to be the ones that are really informative or take forever to make that turn out to have the lowest interactions. That can be frustrating, but I try to learn from it. If even one student is helped by the content, that’s great. And there are always other channels to try to share that information!”
To that end, Lauren has some advice for libraries of all sizes and types when it comes to marketing.
“Get to know your audience, what they care about, where they hang out, what they struggle with. Lead with approachability and benefits. Our audience likes to feel seen and have their problems solved.”
“Track your results, even informally. This will help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses, and the direction your content should go. And don’t be afraid to experiment with types of content, even the casual kind. While we keep our language kind and professional, students love it when we go a little unhinged or use pop culture references in our content.”
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Creating short-form videos is one of the best ways to reach your community. But… convincing colleagues to step in front of the camera is difficult!
If you’re running into resistance — or just quiet reluctance — this episode is for you. I break down how to reframe video participation, build buy-in internally, and help staff feel confident instead of self-conscious on camera.
Plus, I’m giving kudos to a library that created a hilarious parody video with staff in the midst of a snowstorm!
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
Key Takeaways:
1. Hyper‑local social media works but only with empowered staff. By giving staff autonomy to create content tailored to each branch’s unique audience, the library sees more meaningful engagement than a one‑size‑fits‑all strategy could ever provide.
2. Incentives can spark huge engagement if the program is simple. Josh’s initial point‑based contest led to dramatic increases in reach, interactions, and followers at participating branches. But it also revealed the importance of designing challenges that align with staff capacity.
3. Start small, collaborate early, and refine as you go. Josh’s biggest lesson: don’t skip the research stage. Understanding staff time, motivations, and manager buy‑in is essential.
Josh Mosey lives in the same town where he grew up: Middleville, Michigan.
“My older brother and I used to ride our bikes to the library in the summer when we were kids and take part in the summer reading program,” remembers Josh. “I wasn’t as big a reader then, but I did enjoy the books on cassette tape that came with the physical books attached. When nothing new was available in that form, I’d pick a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, which I would read until one or two endings and call it good.”
“I was a notorious cheater when it came to counting books for the summer reading challenge back then. I’m making up for it now by reading voraciously as a grownup.”
Josh can get plenty of books, thanks to his current job as part of the six-person Library Marketing and Communications team and the Kent District Library. KDL serves 440,000 residents in Kent County, MI, excluding the city of Grand Rapids and a couple of smaller municipalities on the north end of the county. The library consists of twenty branches, one express library, and a bookmobile.
Josh is responsible for email and social media marketing for KDL. And the social media part of his job involves working with 20 “social media branch champions”. These are staff members appointed to create content and list events on their branch’s Facebook page.
“The social media branch champions have been around for as long as each branch has had its own Facebook page,” explains Josh. “They are chosen by that location’s manager as someone who either has time, interest, or expertise in that area. While I oversee the group, give tips, and create content they can use, the social media branch champions don’t take orders from me.”
Josh says the goal of our social media branch champions is to engage with their community, cultivate relationships with community members who might come to their events in person, and reflect the things that make their communities unique.
“Since the patrons at each branch can vary widely in interests and socioeconomic makeup, a one-size-fits-all mentality doesn’t work for our branch pages,” he says.
But this system has its challenges.
“Skills and interests vary widely from branch to branch,” explains Josh. “My graphic design background is borne out of the fact that my roommate in college was a graphic design major, and he let me play around on his computer with Photoshop. I’ve been able to do a lot with that over the years, but I’m a rarity among library staff members. Most folks have backgrounds in library science, literature, or education.”
“And while we have a comprehensive brand guideline and I’ve given the team examples of what a well-designed image should look like, some folks just don’t have the time, interest, or expertise to create on-brand, engaging content.”
And because this job likely falls under the “other duties as assigned” for many of the social media branch champions, they may not want to take on the frustrating job of posting to social media. So, Josh decided to incentivize social media work for this library.
“The incentives are based on best practices like consistent posting, interacting with local groups, sharing posts from the main KDL page, promoting branch events, and so on,” explains Josh. “Each of those activities is awarded a specific point value, and the points are calculated quarterly. At the end of each quarter, the branch with the most points wins a pizza party for their branch, a bookstore gift card for themselves, and temporary ownership of a goat trophy that says, ‘You’re the G.O.A.T.’”
Josh says the incentives worked well… at first.
“While some branches simply didn’t have time to put their numbers in (or participate, really), the branches that took the competition seriously saw massive increases in followers, interaction, and post views and likes.”
For example, Josh says the first branch to win was the Alto Branch of KDL. The results were as follows:
Views increased by more than 356 percent.
Reach increased by 811 percent.
Content interactions increased 334 percent.
Link clicks increased by 1,400 percent.
Visits to the Alto Facebook page increased 51 percent.
Follows increased by nearly 191 percent.
That sounds like a great leap. But when Josh solicited feedback from the branch champions on the incentive program, he discovered that most felt participation was just one more thing they needed to squeeze into their already busy routines, especially in the summer and fall. So Josh is making some changes.
“The program is going to change from a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet into a simple, physical Bingo sheet with twenty-five challenges that a branch can do monthly,” says Josh. “The more bingos a champion earns, the more chances they’ll have to win a prize. This should still get at the heart of what motivated the ones who participated while addressing the complexity of the previous version of the challenge for those who didn’t do much with it.”
Josh has some candid advice for anyone considering a similar incentive program for staff.
“I was too quick to go from the ideation phase into implementation,” confesses Josh. “I should have done a little more research into what my champions had time for and what exactly would motivate them.”
“I would encourage libraries that want to do this to sit down with the folks who manage their library’s social media presences, along with those folks’ managers, to increase the level of buy-in at the beginning.”
“Also, simpler is better. I was trying to get my people to do all the right things from the beginning, but I probably should have started smaller by focusing on two or three things each month until everyone had some momentum going for a bigger training and competition event.”
And Josh has one more, unrelated piece of social media advice for libraries.
“Don’t give up on social media posts that use words,” advises Josh. “Photos and videos are great, but it’s okay to make basic, nice-looking posts with nothing but words on them. It’s been working for us since I started in my role four years ago, across all our platforms.”
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:
Short-form video trends can help libraries reach new audiences… but only when they’re used at the right time.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I explain how to recognize which trends are worth following, when to act quickly, and how to avoid content that feels cliché.
Plus, I’ll share kudos for a library marketer whose promotional tactics bring new visitors from around the world (!) to his programs.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 