Instagram is revealing some secrets for increasing engagement on your posts. And one of these tips was a total shocker to me!
We’re going to talk about how to put these new tips to work for your library’s social media marketing strategy in this episode of the Library Marketing Show.
Plus, we’ll give kudos to a library that’s highlighting staff talent in a very unusual way.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
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A viewer wants to know if her library should have a separate Instagram account for her teenage audience. It’s a great question!
I’m going to share some pros and cons. And spoiler alert… my “cons” list is longer than the “pros” list… in this episode of The Library Marketing Show.
Plus, I’ll give kudos to a library that took a popular meme and made a funny and effective social media post relevant to their audience.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? 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:
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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If your library is having trouble getting new cardholders and you want to attract more people but don’t have any money, what do you do? In this episode of the Library Marketing Show, I’ve got four tips for you!
Plus, we’ll do kudos but with a twist. This shout-out goes to a podcast and all the librarians who have appeared on it.
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:
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:
We have breaking news on the social media front. Instagram is making a huge feature change. This is so big that I upended my entire Library Marketing Show editorial calendar to record this episode.
We will discuss what will happen and how it might impact your library marketing.
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 on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
Here’s a shocking headline: It turns out that young people are not using Google to find your library!
How do we know this? There’s a new study from Forbes that may have you rethinking your strategy on search and where you post your library promotions. I’ll share the results with you in this episode of The Library Marketing Show.
Plus we’ll give kudos to a library system offering a much-needed service for its community.
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:
About 10 miles north of the northernmost coast of Scotland lay an archipelago or chain of islands called Orkney. The islands surround Neolithic sites dating back 5,000 years with tall sandstone cliffs and colonies of seals. Archeological evidence shows that humans have lived on the island for nearly 9,000 years.
That’s where John Peterson lives and works. He has managed social media for Orkney Library & Archive since 2017.
The library is one of the oldest public libraries in Scotland, dating back to 1683. These days, the Orkney library has two physical locations, a mobile library, and serves a population of about 22,000 people.
“Orkney is a very rural community with a lot of farming and agriculture,” explains John. “And of course, we’re an island so we’re surrounded by the sea and have a lot of maritime history, particularly from the 20th Century and the World Wars.”
The Orkney library may be remote, but it has fans worldwide. In fact, one of my readers nominated this library for a profile, saying “I love their use of social media and how they got such a small library on the world map.”
“We’re a very small organization and so we don’t have a marketing team or anything like that,” says John. “We just try to share what we’re doing with our followers on social media and have a bit of fun as we go along.”
“We use social media as a way of sharing what’s happening in the library and the archive and what we do every day. It’s a good way of showing off Orkney and what it is to be a library and archive service in the 21st century.”
“It has its challenges sometimes but it’s probably still our favourite as a way of telling stories and making fun posts or threads,” explains John. “For us, it has been a great way of communicating an idea with a few words and pictures. Our Twitter following is approximately 4 times the entire population we serve.”
“Instagram is our newest platform, but it has a growing audience, and we get a lot of nice feedback.”
“The platforms work differently, so we often have to tweak the posts slightly to suit each. Often, we post on Twitter first and then on to the other two platforms.”
When John sees a particularly effective post, he builds on that success by sharing the same kind of content his audience is responding to. But he admits that, like most of you, he’s sometimes baffled by what does and doesn’t work!
“We post different kinds of content,” explains John. “But they usually involve books, archives, or old photographs.”
Today is #TolkienReadingDay so we're in the hobbit of letting folk boromir #Tolkien Books than usual. We're not being smaug but we're a library and it's good to shire. So come along and baggins yourself some books. 📚
“Sometimes a post takes off far better than you expected and other times a post that you thought was interesting or funny doesn’t get much engagement. There is a whole load of reasons for that and it’s important not to get too disheartened if something doesn’t work.”
“Of course when a post doesn’t work it could be that the idea wasn’t good or wasn’t communicated well enough. But often it is just a case of timing – wrong time, wrong day, it didn’t get the retweets to send it further across the platform, etc. You could post the same post at two different times and get totally different responses.”
Try to post good content and try to post regularly – but not too much. Not every post can be funny or interesting. But try to make sure that some of them are so people have a reason to follow you.
Try to make it interesting. Don’t just do what everyone else is doing, and don’t rely on sharing content from other accounts.
Try to write your own stuff and find your own voice.
Pay attention to what works for you and then do more of it. Listen to feedback, good and bad – it’ll help you to do more of what people like and less of what they don’t.
Don’t be controversial and try to avoid politics.
Concentrate on what makes your library or organization different from everyone else and try to use those things to build your own presence and identity.
Look around you. Spot opportunities for good content. The more you do it the easier it gets.
Find some libraries on social media and follow them, no matter where they are in the world. They don’t have to be the famous places you’re always hearing about to be worth following. Anybody can be worth following if they post good, interesting content – even small local libraries on remote islands. Find some libraries and archives, museums and galleries, and give them a follow. You’ll be glad you did.
In one of our archive strong rooms there is a shelf. The shelf does not contain the most exciting or interesting item in the archive but it does contain something amazing.
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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:
Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 