There’s some exciting new advice on how to create engagement on your library’s Facebook page. The 8 new tips are in this episode of the Library Marketing Show.
Plus kudos goes to an academic librarian who recently received a huge award!
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!
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Once again, Facebook remains the single most popular social media platform for libraries. In fact, the percentage of library staff who use Facebook for library marketing rose by 7 percentage points this year, to a whopping 97 percent, according to the annual Super Library Marketing Survey.
I believe part of that rise can be traced to the turmoil at X, formerly known as Twitter. I’ve talked with libraries who shifted their focus back to Facebook this year because they could no longer rely on Twitter/X for reach.
And overall Facebook organic engagement rose this year for the first time in a while. It appears that Meta took advantage of the chaos at Twitter/X by adjusting their algorithm to boost organic reach, and that’s good news for all of us.
According to Statista, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, with 2.9 billion monthly active users. 70 percent of Americans log on each day, and 74 percent of Canadians log on daily. Canada, by the way, has the highest daily log-on percentage for Facebook in the world!
How are people using Facebook right now?
Here are some statistics to consider from SocialPilot.
Facebook users spend an average of 19.42 hours a month on the platform.
Most Facebook users (nearly 82 percent) use the mobile version of the platform. But that percentage has dropped from last year. Interesting, right?
31 percent of Americans use Facebook to get their news. 🙁
And here’s the whopper stat: Facebook use among teens in the US has dropped significantly this year, by 39 percentage points, to just 32 percent. So… don’t use Facebook to try to reach teens.
However, people between the ages of 25 and 34 make up the largest audience on Facebook. That one took me by surprise!
How much success can we see on Facebook?
These engagement statistics come from Hubspot and SocialPilot.
The median engagement rate for Facebook is 0.060 percent. Ouch.
Facebook photo posts get the highest engagement rate, at 0.12 percent.
The average Facebook user likes 11 posts every month.
Live videos on Facebook get 26 percent higher engagement than live videos on other platforms.
Almost 50 percent of the time people spend on Facebook is spent watching videos.
The Margaret E. Heggan Library received high engagement from this post introducing a new staff member.
The Facebook algorithm for 2024
Here are the ranking signals Facebook uses to decide who sees your posts.
Facebook prioritizes content from friends and family members over content from business pages. For libraries, this means that it’s important to get people to comment or share your posts. When they do that, the friends and family members of your engaged users are more likely to see your content. And those engaged followers will see more of your library’s content.
Facebook prioritizes posts based on both the number and length of comments.
Facebook prioritizes posts that have a higher number of reactions and a variety of reactions.
Facebook prioritizes the type of content that people like. So for example, if your Facebook videos are the most popular type of content posted from your library’s page, Facebook will show people more of your videos and less of your other types of content like photo posts or plain text posts.
Here are four ways to get the best organic reach for your library’s Facebook posts in 2024.
Create a formula that emphasizes entertaining posts and encourages meaningful interaction.
People are coming to social media to connect with friends and for entertainment, according to data released by Oberlo earlier this year.
I heard this at the Library Marketing and Communications Conference too. Facebook users are increasingly using the platform to fill time and fight boredom. (That’s why video is such a big deal on Facebook–it’s fun to watch!)
To keep our Facebook audience engaged with our posts, we need to make them entertaining. Experiment to create a formula to balance posts that build your library’s brand and raise awareness of your library offerings. That might look like this:
Entertaining posts including memes, GIFs, fun library-centric videos, and conversation starters: 70 percent
Sharing other people’s content, including library users and partners: 20 percent
Promotional posts: 10 percent
Create a formula based on your audience and your library’s overall goals. Then experiment with it for a month. Check your insights. If your audience engagement is steady, or growing, you know you’ve hit on the right combination! If you haven’t seen any growth in engagement, you can try adjusting your formula.
Each library’s audience is unique, so your formula will be different than the formula used by the library in the neighboring town.
The reach of link posts continues to decline. According to Social Media Today, views of Facebook posts that include links have declined by as much as 50 percent in the past two years. This is because Meta is turning away from news and informative content. Now it’s more focused on entertainment.
Click on the post below to see how Champaign Public Library uses this technique.
If you are trying to drive awareness of an event or promote an item in your collection, share the link to your event calendar or catalog in the first comment after you publish the post. For those of you who use scheduling apps to manage your posts, that means you will have to go to Facebook after the post schedules and add the link. Yes, I know it’s a pain.
The alternative option is to use visual elements or video to explain the action you wish the public to take, rather than adding the link to the comments. In other words, create a graphic carousel with words that convey the action you wish your followers to take. Just be sure to add alt text to your images so viewers with visual impairments can also interact with your posts.
Try simple text-only posts in the feed.
Katie Bulloff of the Indianapolis Public Library uses this method to great results. She usually asks a question or posts a prompt to get the conversation going.
Just be careful with the backgrounds and text provided by Facebook. They’re not always accessible. Use a color contrast checker to make sure you’re in compliance with accessibility standards.
Clermont County Public Library also uses this technique.
Post videos to Facebook, including Reels and Stories.
The ability to cross-post your Instagram Reels to Facebook makes it a no-brainer to use this feature. Meta is highly focused on video content and continues to add more features including A/B testing, creating Reels from existing clips, and more.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated. Here is a Reel that Plainville Public Library created from a series of static photos. As of this writing, it’s gotten more than 300 views. Their service population is less than 17,000 residents!
Facebook (and other platforms) are focused on video because that’s the kind of content that increasingly gets attention from followers. It’s entertaining. So, here’s the plan.
Post to Reels.
Share your Reel to your Stories.
Share your regular Facebook Feed posts to Stories.
Post original content directly to Stories.
Stories are extremely popular with users. My Gen Z daughters never look at the Feed. They only look at Stories. So it makes sense to devote library marketing energy to that feature.
Maybe also try…
Facebook Groups: I’ve heard libraries talk about the varying degrees of success using the Groups feature. I really think it depends on your specific community. But certainly, if you haven’t experimented with Groups, now might be a good time to do that!
Groups are not for promotion: rather, they’re a community-building tool. However, if you can build an engaged Facebook Group, it goes to reason that the members of that group will see more of your regular Feed, Story, and Reel posts!
Messaging your followers: Social Media Today says many Facebook pages are switching to private messaging groups to share their latest updates, as opposed to posting publicly. Your messages would be outside the influence of the algorithm. It’s worth experimenting with!
When to post on Facebook
Post once a day on the Facebook feed, either early in the morning, around lunchtime, or around 8 p.m.
Post at least one slide to Facebook Stories every day.
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 this episode, I share two social media updates that are relevant for libraries. I’ll tell you about YouTube’s “New to You” feature and Facebook explained how its algorithm works!
Kudos in this episode go to the ten libraries in the UK who participated in the “Creating Space for Kindness” Project.
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, click on the “Follow” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
This week, Facebook announced it is making another change in the way the social media platform chooses to show content to its users. The big shift, as you likely know by now, is that Facebook will prioritize posts from friends and family in its news feed over public content from pages, like that of your library. In particular, the Facebook team will give top priority to posts that drive conversation between friends and family.
The announcement is causing consternation for many libraries, which rely heavily on organic, unpaid traffic for their promotional efforts. I honestly don’t know what the end effect will be. I have the same worries as most of my library colleagues. We’ve adjusted well since the last major algorithm change in 2015. So will we have to start over? In the wake of this announcement, I’ve wondered if the chicken comes before the egg. In other words, do our well-performing posts get more interaction because, prior to this week, Facebook has shown them to people in anticipation of interaction… or do they perform well because people are interacting with them? (Deep thoughts!!)
In the Facebook group, Libraries and Social Media, I asked social media marketers at libraries to comment on the change. Caleb Sheaffer of Shreve Memorial Library in Shreveport, LA said, “I never know what to expect until it actually happens. Right now, all the posts that perform well for our library are ones that have the most interaction anyway.”
Jennifer Redford from Boise, Idaho added, “I think that we’ll just need to focus more on writing and sharing great content. We’ve also started using events more and I wonder how that will be affected by the change.”
Finally, Molly Wetta, manager of the Santa Barbara Public Library, told me, “These announcements are pushing me to move forward more quickly with an idea I’ve had for a while. We’re experimenting with linked groups – I started one for youth services specific content, and we may also try one for smaller communities and branches within our system if this one is successful. The goals are to work more to create community connections in addition to marketing our events/services. I do love the events feature, and the notifications will hopefully be helpful but not intrusive. We’ll be sharing book recommendations and answering book-related questions, sharing early literacy tips and activities, and hopefully answering questions.”
The bottom line is that your library’s page may see your overall statistics drop. Your reach and referral traffic, your shares, and your comments may drop. MAY is the key word there. My overall impression of this change is that it will force library marketers to work smarter when using Facebook. All of the pointers in this recent article on Facebook still apply.
And now, more than ever, you must make sure your posts are really good. Share content from other sources related to books and literature–don’t just promote your own stuff, particularly on posts. Use events to promote your events. Ask questions. Create polls. And most importantly, shoot video. As we know, Facebook users respond in a big way to video. Facebook says live videos often lead to discussion among viewers and live videos get six times as many interactions as regular videos. So video marketing must be part of your plan.
You can also explain to your followers what is happening and ask them to choose to see your posts. People who want to see more posts from your library page can select See First in News Feed Preferences. You can also do what Molly’s library is doing and experiment with groups. One of my favorite Facebook pages did that this weekend and they put a little money behind it to make sure all their followers know about the move.
Finally, don’t bait people to interact with your posts. In this week’s announcement, Facebook made it very clear that they will penalize pages which use engagement bait, like. Use real questions and conversation starters. Read this article to see how to avoid engagement bait.
Here’s the thing to remember: posting content on Facebook is like building your house on rented land. It doesn’t belong to you and as much as it pains your library system when changes are made, there is little we can do about it. The big lesson is that we need to start relying on our own platforms and websites for promoting our programs and services. That means we should be building our own audience with blogs, podcasts, and other content delivery systems. We should be developing email subscriber lists so we can target and market to our specific library cardholders and give them the content they really want.
Facebook is great, but they’re not the only way to reach customers. Let’s make a concerted effort to start moving to other content delivery platforms where we have more control. Our fans are loyal and they’ll respond when we deliver content specifically targeted to them.
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on “Follow” button on the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Connect with me on Twitter and Snapchat–it’s where I talk about library marketing! I’m @Webmastergirl. I’m also on LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. Views in this post are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 