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The 2024 Guide to YouTube for Libraries: Updated Tips To Get the Most Organic Reach

Library employees, including men and women, sorting film canisters in the 1960s.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

This is part of the 2024 series of social media guides for libraries. It includes:

We’ll cover Twitter/X on December 18. Stay tuned!

YouTube for Libraries

YouTube remains the third most popular social media platform for libraries, according to the 2023 Super Library Marketing Survey. I’d like to see that number rise. Here’s why.

If you’re thinking about where to devote your limited video energy, I personally recommend YouTube over Instagram and TikTok. I know that’s not conventional wisdom. It comes from my own personal experience.

My YouTube channel gets higher engagement and has been more effective in reaching my audience and getting them to take action than Instagram or TikTok. In fact, I rarely, if ever, get clicks to my website from TikTok or Instagram.

TikTok and Instagram are great for brand awareness. But if you have tangible marketing goals (and I sure hope you do!), YouTube is your platform.

If you don’t believe me, consider this.

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, bested only by Google. YouTube gets more website traffic than Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Instagram, and Amazon combined!

*according to SEMrush
A successful tutorial video from Jessamine County Public Library posted on YouTube.

How are people using YouTube right now?

Here are some more YouTube statistics to consider, according to Sprout Social.

  • The United States has the second-largest YouTube audience in the world.
  • Adults in the U.S. spend an average of 46 minutes a day on YouTube.
  • 62 percent of YouTube users log onto the platform every single day.
  • 55 percent of U.S. viewers prefer shorter video content over long videos on YouTube.
  • 77 percent of YouTube viewers are between the ages of 15 and 35 years old.
  • YouTube viewers skew slightly male. Men make up about 54 percent of the audience.

Here’s the most compelling reason to consider a library marketing strategy for YouTube: Google owns YouTube. YouTube videos are automatically integrated into the main Google search.

I typed “How do I get a library card” into Google and I was served these three videos.

If someone is looking for something that your library provides, and you’ve optimized your videos, it improves the chances that a non-cardholder will discover your library through your YouTube videos.

How much success can we see on YouTube?

I found it very difficult to get updated engagement information for YouTube. Descript says accounts with less than 10,000 followers see an average engagement rate of 5.22%. Every other source I checked either reported engagement rates that seemed way too high to be believable or didn’t list an average engagement rate at all.

However, I did run across a cool new tool in my research. HypeAuditor has a free YouTube engagement rate calculator. Here’s a look at how it rated my YouTube channel.

You’ll need to sign up for an account and potentially pay to get the full report. But the number I wanted, the engagement rate, was free. Run a report on your library’s YouTube channel once a month to track your stats throughout 2024.

The YouTube algorithm for 2024

The YouTube algorithm focuses on one, core goal for the platform: to keep viewers watching videos for as long as possible. Viewers are recommended videos on YouTube and viewers use the search bar to find content.

Here are the four ranking factors that YouTube uses to decide who sees your library’s videos.

  • Video title and description: YouTube uses the title and description to match your video with viewers who are looking for that type of content. It’s important to be clear about what your video is about, especially in the title. For example, a video titled “Frank Discussion about ‘Let Us Descend’ by Jesmyn Ward” will get you more views than the video titled “Thursday Winter Reading BookClub Discussion”.
  • Watch time: The amount of time people spend watching your videos is incredibly important. If you create videos that are engaging and you can get people to watch most, if not all of the way through, your videos will rank much higher.
  • The newness of your video: YouTube will rank your videos according to how recently you uploaded the video. Like most social media platforms, they are always on the hunt for new content. However, in my experience, if you promote a video months after it’s been uploaded and it gets a new round of engagement, then that video will be re-recommended by YouTube.😊
  • Engagement metrics: Likes, comments, and shares will all work to boost the ranking of your videos.
A fun video with a great title and description from Prince William Public Libraries.

Here are four ways to get the best organic reach for your library’s YouTube videos in 2024,

Find your niche and stick to it.

The expert advice I found in my research all says the same thing: the best way to see success on YouTube is to find a topic that interests your audience and then stick to making videos in that niche.

I know that’s hard advice for libraries to hear and follow. Most library YouTube channels have many playlists with videos covering a wide variety of topics. Many libraries view their YouTube channel like the stacks… a place to store all their videos.

That’s not the approach to take if you want a successful YouTube channel. Your library’s YouTube channel is not meant to be a repository of videos.

Making a commitment to focus on one or two niche topics that your audience is interested in is a better use of your time. How do you figure out your niche?

Dive into the analytics of your YouTube channel. Which videos get the highest engagement? The topics in those videos are your niche. Spend 2024 creating videos about those topics.

If you must store videos on your YouTube channel for use elsewhere, put them in unlisted playlists. If you do that, their lack of engagement won’t count against you in the algorithm.

A San Jose Public Library volunteer put together this incredible video for the library’s YouTube channel. You can ask volunteers and teen patrons to help produce your videos!

Find less competitive keywords to use in your titles and descriptions.

Keywords and key phrases in your video title and description play a huge role in YouTube’s success. There are lots of ways you can search for keywords and key phrases that will boost your organic reach on YouTube. But my hands down personal favorite tool is TubeBuddy. It’s a free Chrome extension that’s easy to use.

TubeBuddy has a feature called Keyword Explorer that helps you figure out your video titles and identifies key phrases to add to your description. Here’s how it works:

I used TubeBuddy to do some keyword research. “Book club” is a very competitive keyword. So TubeBuddy lists the score as fair. If you were posting a video about a book club, you would want to add other keywords that are less competitive, like the title of the book, to rank higher on YouTube.
Next, I tried adding the title of the book and the phrase “book club”, and our score made it into the good range. There’s less competition in search but TubeBuddy also says there aren’t many people looking for videos about that book.
Finally, I tried “analysis of let us descend” and TubeBuddy’s results show this would be an excellent choice for a key phrase. If I were a library, I’d put this phrase in my title and in my description.

This whole process took me less than five minutes. I do this with all my YouTube videos. It has made a world of difference in my engagement rates.

I made a tutorial to show you how TubeBuddy works and the benefits of using it for your library.

Spend time responding to your viewers.

We know the YouTube algorithm will rank your videos higher if your viewers like, comment, and share your videos. But YouTube also adds a boost to your videos if your library participates in that engagement. It’s very easy and takes very little time. All you have to do is…

  • When someone comments on your video, reply to them.
  • Pin a comment.

I know from personal experience that those two simple steps will work wonders for boosting the reach of your video.

This is what a pinned comment looks like. To pin a comment, click on the three-dot “hamburger” menu to the right of the comment and select “pin.”

Promote your videos as soon as you publish them.

Within the first 24 hours of uploading and releasing a video, send an email to your cardholders to alert your audience that the video exists. You can also embed the video on your website or blog. Maybe add a carousel slide to your homepage that leads to the videos. And add a link to your video in your email signature.

These promotions are all designed to get you views as quickly as possible. The more views you get in the first 24 hours after you’ve uploaded a YouTube video, the higher your YouTube video will appear in search rankings.

An absolutely adorable video from Leicestershire Libraries explaining their Summer Reading program.

Maybe also try…

Posting to Shorts: YouTube is reportedly testing a new feature that would let you easily link a Shorts video to a longer video. That would make Shorts an effective way to drive people to your library’s channel. 

In case you were wondering how big of a deal Shorts are, Social Media Today reports that there are 50 billion views of Shorts clips every day worldwide!

I am a big personal YouTube user, and I watch all the Shorts recommended to me. The Shorts algorithm appears to be more aligned with my personal video preferences than any other social media platform. If you have the time and energy, experiment with Shorts for your library.

A great Short posted by the Leiden University Libraries.

How often and when to post on YouTube

Consistency is a key component of YouTube’s success. If your library only has the resources to post once a week, pick a consistent day and time to schedule your posting, like Mondays at 9 a.m. Your audience will begin to expect and anticipate the release of your videos.

Influencer Marketing Hub has a cool calculation tool that determines the best time for your library to post videos based on your location. You can boost anticipation by using the “Premiere” feature on YouTube. Here is YouTube’s easy guide for creating a Premiere.

P.S. Want more help?

A 13-Year-Old Kid Gives Library Marketing Advice About YouTube. Is He Right??

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The 2024 Guide to Facebook for Libraries: Updated Tips To Get the Most Organic Reach

Two women in pantsuits sitting at a table outdoors on Fountain Square in Cincinnati in the 1970s, selling books.
Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

This is part of the 2024 series of social media guides for libraries. It includes posts on:

We’ll cover Twitter/X on Dec. 18. Stay tuned!

Facebook for libraries

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.

This purely entertaining post from Dickinson County Library has high engagement numbers.

Share links in the comments, not in the post.

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.
  • Post a Facebook Reel once a week.

P.S. Want more help?

It’s Okay To Take A Break From Social Media! Here Are the Benefits of a Pause for Your Library

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2

Conquering Social Media for Your Library: The Seven Decisions You Need To Make Before You Create Your Next Post!

Photo courtesy Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County

I love libraries. I work with libraries. I talk to library staff every single day. I like, share, and comment on library social media posts.

But every time I open my app for any of the platforms, I NEVER see content from libraries.

Why?

The odds are never in our favor, thanks to algorithms.

It’s a daily battle that libraries face. Social media is free and easy.

But it’s also not free and easy.

It’s incredibly, insanely difficult to figure out what works on social media when the rules are constantly changing. If you don’t have time or staff to keep up, it can be exhausting and demoralizing.

But like it or not, libraries must use social media to promote their services, collection, and events. We must do our best to work with the algorithms, for better or worse.

Starting next week, I’ll begin my annual six-part series laying out best practices for the top platforms used for promotion by libraries.

I chose these platforms because of a survey you, dear readers, so graciously answered. Nearly 300 library staffers let me know which social media platforms your library uses for promotion.

Before the platform best practice series begins, it’s important to set your library up for success by creating a social media style guide.

This is different than a social media policy, which lays out guidelines for how your staff will use social media to communicate with the public and sets rules for how the community interacts with you and others on your library’s social media accounts.

A social media style guide will ensure your posts are clear and consistent, no matter what platform you post on. It will take the guesswork out of many aspects of posting and make your work more efficient.

A social media style guide has seven parts. Here are the key decisions you should make now to ensure future success on social.

Make a list of all your social media accounts

Include your library’s handle on each platform. This will give you get a clear picture of the naming conventions you’ve used for your accounts.

Are the names consistent across channels? If not, choose a style and note it in your style guide.

Then, the next time a new social media platform is launched, you can claim and name your new account in a way that will make it easily discoverable for your existing fans.

Identify your library’s demographics for each platform.

Look at the insights for each of the platforms. Who is interacting with your posts? Your audience will be different for every platform. Make a list of the different audiences.

Because of the algorithms, you have very little control over who sees your post on any given platform. But you can get to know your available audiences and create content that will engage them.

If you are struggling with time management and you want to cut down on the number of social media posts you do, you can look at your lists of demographics. Identify the platforms with the audiences that will help you achieve your overall library and marketing goals. Post to those platforms and put the rest on hold.

Create a mission statement for each platform.

Look at your library’s goals for the year and what you know about each platform. Then write a one or two sentence mission statement for each of the social media platforms, lining up your library’s goals with the currently available audience for that platform.

For example:

  • LinkedIn: Discover career advice, business tips, and free resources that will help you succeed at work.
  • Twitter: Get regular updates on our collection, library events, and the literary and entertainment world.
  • Instagram: Photos tell the library’s story, one snapshot at a time.

These platform-specific mission statements, combined with the demographics you identified in the previous step, will help you visualize your audience every time you post. You’ll be able to connect with them because you’ll know who they are, and what they expect from you.

Decide the voice and tone you’ll use for each platform.

You want to use the same language and tone across platforms for consistency. The goal is to make sure your audience recognizes your posts no matter which platform they are on. Some things to consider include:

  • Whether your library will use formal or conversational text.
  • The words, phrases, and names that are specific to your library and can be used in posts. For instance, does your Maker Space or your Bookmobile have a specific branded name? Include that in your list.
  • Make a list of the acronyms your library commonly uses internally, along with the full spelled-out versions of what they stand for. Decide whether it’s appropriate to use the acronyms on each social channel, or if the full terms should be used.
  • Include parameters for inclusive language that will be standard for your library. For example, will your library remove the use of pronouns to be inclusive to all genders? How will you refer to people living with disabilities?

Choose an expert to make grammar and punctuation choices for you.

You can define whether you’ll use an existing style guide, like the Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style. Or you may decide to rely on add-ons like Grammarly.

This decision will take the guesswork out of your library’s use of serial commas, headline capitalization, dash style, dates and times, and more.

Define the aesthetics.

This section will lay the groundwork for the visual portion of your posts. Decisions to be made here include:

  • Will you use your library’s defined brand colors?
  • Which fonts will your library use in images, cover photos, and for short-form social media posts like Instagram Stories and Reels?
  • How will your library’s logo be used on social media? Will it be used as the profile photo for your platforms? Can it be added to images? If so, where will it be placed and how large should it be?
  • Will you use emojis, GIFs, and memes? Which ones? How many? On what channels? How often?
  • Will you include a call to action in every post? What kinds of action words will you use in your call to action?
  • How often will you include links in your posts? Will you use a URL shortener?
  • Which hashtags will you use? How many hashtags are acceptable on each platform?
  • Will your library use filters and effects in your posts?

Formalize curation

Your library can share the blog posts, infographics, case studies, and interesting posts created by other organizations on your platforms. This is a great way to add value for your available social media audiences without creating new content of your own. Some key decisions to make around curated content include:

  • Which sources will your library share from?
  • Which sources will you not share from?
  • How will you cite third-party content?

You May Also Want to Read These Articles

Three Design Tips For Creating Beautiful Social Media Graphics for Your Library

Why It’s OKAY for Your Library To Pull Back on Posting on a Social Media Platform!

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.

9

Twitter Changes Their Image Policy, New Instagram Trends, and the Best Times to Post on Each Platform!

Watch Now

The Library Marketing​​​​​​​​ Show, Episode 96

In this episode, we’ll go through the latest updates for social media platforms and what they mean for libraries.

This month’s headlines include a change in Twitter’s image cropping policy, a new report on Instagram use, and another new report that lays out the “alleged” best times to post on each social media platform. Watch the video to find out why I believe libraries should take this third report with a grain of salt!

Kudos go to the Coralville Public Library. Watch the video to find out why a fellow viewer nominated them for mention in this episode.

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!

Angela’s latest book reviews

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

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Listen To This! How To Use Social Listening To Gain New Insight and Catch Promotional Opportunities for Your Library

Photo courtesy The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Main library, 1920.

In 2016, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County caught wind of a fantastic promotional opportunity.

I don’t remember the exact quote, but this is a paraphrase of a Tweet our library saw that revealed a local man’s big plan.

“My son and I are planning a big adventure. We’re going to try to visit all 41 Cincinnati library branches in one day.  We’ll take a picture at each branch. Wish us luck!”

The father didn’t tag our library. Still, our social media manager found out about the plan by practicing social listening.

What is social listening?

Your library already tracks mentions, shares, comments, and hashtags related to your library. They record and analyze those engagement metrics to figure out the effectiveness of your library’s promotions on social media.

Social listening is a step beyond that.

Social listening is the purposeful search for conversations about your library on social media platforms, both the ones you are using to promote your library and the ones you are not using.

It’s not looking to see how your library’s marketing is landing. Rather, it’s looking to see the conversations that happen about your library between people who may or may not use your library or who may or may not see any marketing from your library.

Imagine if you could eavesdrop on the conversations people are having about your library when you’re not around. What do you think your community would say?

“That children’s librarian is a hoot. His storytimes are fun, even for the adults.”

“I cannot believe I have to create a separate login and password to use some of the library’s free stuff. It’s so frustrating and time-consuming.”

“Big interview on Monday. I could really use some help figuring out what kinds of questions they’ll ask and practicing my answers. There ought to be a service like that at the library.”

These three made-up examples illustrate the valuable information your library can uncover when it practices social listening.  

Social listening will give you a clearer picture of how people feel about your library. You may be able to spot problems before they happen. And you will certainly spot promotional opportunities which you can amplify to connect to more users.

In the case of the father and son Cincinnati Library branch adventure, our marketing staff reached out to the dad. We told him we loved his plan and wanted to follow along. We ended up turning their marathon day-long quest to visit all our branches into a memorable cover story for our quarterly content marketing magazine, Library Links.

Read the story about the Grand Library Adventure

Free social media listening tools

If your library uses a social media scheduling platform, it will have the ability to integrate social listening into your dashboard in some form. Check the help section of the platform for instructions.

There are also free tools to help you with social listening.

Boardreader: This site searches forums, websites, blogs, and messaging boards. Type the name of your library into the search bar to find all the posts mentioning your library.

TweetDeck.com: This tool is run by Twitter and lets you monitor live feeds across the platform.

Also, read this post to see how to use Google alerts for social listening as well as catch media mentions of your library. If your library gets media coverage, you may find conversations about your library in the comment section of the story and on the social media pages of the media outlet.

What to monitor with social listening

You’ll want to set up your social listening tools to monitor:

  • Your library’s name and social media handle
  • Common misspellings of your library’s name and social media handle
  • Names of your services, especially branded names, like the name of your bookmobile, your Library of Things, your summer reading program, your storytimes, etc.
  • Common terms associated with libraries like reading, librarian, book drop, etc.
  • The names of senior leaders like your director and board members
  • The names of your branches and locations

Opportunities to gain from social listening

Social listening means you can interact more with your community. Cardholders (and non-cardholders) may talk about your library but not directly tag you. If you are doing social listening, you will still spot those interactions.

You might consider responding. This can create those surprise and delight moments that show that your library cares about its users.

You can also spot problems and trends. If you notice that a lot of community members are posting negative comments about a service, you can elevate that to senior leadership.

Social listening also means you’ll know more about your competitors. If you are “competing” with other organizations in your community or with for-profit companies that provide services similar to your library, you can use social listening to look for opportunities to position your library as a free and better alternative to those competitors.

Finally, social listening can also help you identify library advocates. They might be vocal about their support of the library. You want to connect with these people who already love your library and ask them to speak out for you.

You May Also Want to Read These Posts

New Research on Social Media Use Plus Updates on YouTube and Facebook for Libraries!

How Far in Advance Can I Schedule My Library’s Social Media Posts??

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. Connect with me on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and LinkedIn.

2

The One Social Media Shortcut That Can Tank Engagement and Cost Your Library in a Pandemic–or Anytime!

I know work is hard right now. But there is one time-saving social media marketing technique that libraries should avoid at all costs.

Libraries should avoid cross-posting on social media. Cross-posting is when you post the same text and graphics in a message across multiple social media networks.

I get why many libraries cross-post. Cross-posting is easy. It saves time and energy. And library staff have a lot of work to do. Even when there is no pandemic to deal with, librarians are often asked to take care of marketing along with their regular duties. But the detrimental effects of cross-posting outweigh any time you might save doing it.

Why cross-posting is a bad idea

Cross-posting is a bad idea because social media platforms are different. They have different standards for post length, image size, hashtags, links, and captions.

For example, LinkedIn is more copy-heavy and formal. Instagram is more visual and informal. Twitter is more suited to short quotes, threads, and GIFs. Pinterest is graphic-heavy. One post with the same text and photo can’t be all those things.

An image you post on one platform may not be sized for another platform. It may end up stretched, pixelated, or squished. This will hurt your ranking and engagement.

Speaking of engagement, the metrics are different for each platform. On Facebook, you’re aiming for likes, comments, and shares. On Twitter, you want retweets and replies. On Pinterest, you want comments and re-pins. One post can’t generate all those things.

Your followers are also different depending on the platform. Twitter users are overwhelming between the ages of 18 and 44. LinkedIn users are more likely to have a college degree than users of other platforms. 70 percent of Pinterest users are women. Every platform has a unique demographic with different needs.

When you cross-post, you risk looking inauthentic and spammy. Your posts will feel like they’re auto generated and robotic. It may look like you don’t care about what you post on your account or worse, that you don’t know you to use social media.

Your audience will respond negatively by not responding at all. That hurts your standing in the algorithm. It can have a negative effect on your reach.

What to do instead

Cross-promotion is better! Take your message and adjust it slightly to suit each social media platform. It’s much easier than it sounds.

First, you need a base message. What is the basic info you wish to convey? What is the action you want your followers to take? Answer these two questions in a two or three sentence nugget. This is your base message.

Then take that base message and adjust it for each of the social media platforms you wish to use. A tweak of a word or phrase here and there, an adjustment of an image, and a unique call to action are all you need to be authentic.

Westerville Public Library in Westerville, Ohio did a great job of tweaking this promotion for Twitter…

…and Facebook.

Here’s another good example of cross-promotion from Barlett Public Library District in Illinois. This is their Twitter post…

..and the same message tweaked for Facebook.

Decide how much time your library is willing to invest on social media. Smaller libraries will want to concentrate on the platform or platforms that will give their library the most benefit. If you are pressed for time, pick the platforms that perform best for you or the platforms where the audience you wish to target is using. If that means you only post on one social media network, it’s okay. Quality is better than quantity.

Use a scheduling tool. There are plenty of free scheduling tools that will help you to share your social media messages without cross-posting. I have used the free version of TweetDeck for my personal social media for years. You can schedule lots of posts in advance and the metrics are great. I recommend it for libraries without the budget for scheduling software.

At my former library job, we had a paid account with Sprout Social. It was easy to use and had more cross promotion capabilities than TweetDeck. I recommend it if you have money for a paid scheduling platform.

More library social media advice

How #COVID-19 is Impacting Social Media Marketing and What That Means for Libraries

Self-Care for Library Social Media Staff in the Midst of a Crisis like #COVID-19

What Metrics Demonstrate Your Library’s Social Media Marketing is Working?

How to Reverse Engineer Your Library Marketing Social Media Audiences!

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