Social media in libraries

Social media in libraries

Georgina CroninUX Librarian (Cambridge Judge Business School)

BLA Training Officer@senorcthulhu

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonahowie/7910370882/

Today’s session

• Introduction

• First section: what is it and how do I do it?

• Tea break

• Second section: keeping it all sustainable

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Taylor and Francis’ social media white paper

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Key points

• 70% of libraries using social media: no longer an optional thing

• 60% of libraries have had a social media account for three years or longer

• Key uses: promotion, collection management tool, outreach & teaching and learning

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Activity: How does social media make you feel?

• Draw out how social media makes you feel

• Discuss what you drew with your neighbours

• Share with the rest of the room

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Discussion: What platform do you enjoy using the

most and which do you dislike?

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Lots of choice out there…

• Twitter• Facebook• Blogging: WordPress & Tumblr• YouTube• Google+• Pinterest• Slideshare• Image platforms: Flickr & Instagram• Academic platforms: ResearchGate &

Academia.edu

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Twitter

• 284 million monthly active users• 500 million tweets sent per day• 80% active users are on mobile devices• 77% of accounts are outside of U.S.• Twitter supports 35+ languages• It’s where our clients and students are• Twitter is where news breaks• Good for images, links, research, hashtags• Not good for long message communications

Facebook

• 1.35 billion monthly active users worldwide

• 4.5 billion likes daily

• 1.12 billion active users on mobile devices

• 300 million photo uploads per day

• 50% of 18-24 year olds go on Facebook when they wake up

• 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical to

• Good for images, links, more fun stuff

• Bad for formal engagement as students see Facebook as non-work

Blogging (WordPress)

• 409 million people viewing more than 18 billion pages each month

• Users publish about 42.6 million new posts and leave 63.8 million new comments each month

• Easy to set up and use

• Good for text, images, resource sharing

Blogging (Tumblr)

• 213.3 million blogs with 97.5 billion posts

• 77.4 million daily posts

• Supports 13 different languages

• 42% of traffic is U.S. based

• Good for text, images, resource sharing

• Not so good for long form text

• Great for collaboration and sharing

YouTube

• Acquired by Google in 2006 ($1.65 bn deal)• More than 1 billion unique visitors per month• 6 billion hours of video watched per month• 100 hours of video uploaded every minute• 80% of traffic from outside the U.S.• Covers 61 different languages• YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable

network• How-to and educational videos are the second and third

most popular category on YouTube• Good for tuition videos and sharing resources• Not good for lengthy speech-based resources

Google+

• +1 button used 5 billion times a day

• Having a G+ profile boosts your Google ranking

• You can sort things into Circles

• Only way to comment on YouTube videos

• 540 million active users

• Excellent hangout function

• Good for sharing images, resources

• Not as good as Facebook for engagement

Pinterest

• Over 70 million users

• Increase in non-US users in recent months

• Good for collating images and resources

• Not good for open sharing – membership required to get full experience

• Often used for showing off collections in libraries

Slideshare

• Average of 60 million unique visitors per month• 215 million page views• In top 120 most visited website in world• 6 most used tags: business, statistics, social

media, market, trends, and research• 20% of visitors came directly from Google• Users add 400,000 new presentations per month• Good for sharing resources and training info• Bad for outreach alone…must be used in

collaboration with another platform

Flickr

• Around 87 million registered members

• More than 3.5 million images uploaded daily

• Online community built up around interests

• Available in over 10 languages

• Creative Commons content enabled

• Useful for hosting images for blogs

• Good for sharing images and storing content

• Bad for storing non-public images or restricted content

Instagram

• 200 million monthly active accounts

• More than 65% of users are outside of the US

• 20 billion photos have been shared

• 1.6 billion likes daily

• 60 million uploads per day

• Good for social content and highlighting services

• Bad for anything text based- very visual platform

Academic platforms

• Academia.edu & ResearchGate

• Primarily used by academics to share research

• Social platforms to connect with others (academic Facebook/LinkedIn)

• Awareness raising potential

• Good for sharing academic output of an institution, as well as librarianship output

• Bad for non-research interactions (i.e. UGs)

Tea break

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Keeping it all sustainable

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Good content

• Interesting stuff that people care about

• Not just professional info (humanise your library!)

• Keep it light and like a conversation

• Encourage engagement & run competitions

• No-one cares about opening times

• …or new books (well depends on the book!)

• Make the content fit the platform

• Do not repeat the same message

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Social media policies

• Policies can be liberating frameworks

• Keeps messages on brand & consistency

• Validates all the hard work

• Ensures measurement of success

• Maintains accountability within organisation

• Makes use of social media ‘proper’

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Activity: Planning your policy

• Who is your audience?

• Why be on social media?

• How will you keep it human?

• What will you be promoting?

• How will you manage staffing?

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Getting people converted

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• Empower staff by getting them involved with policy development

• Ownership of social media content is key

• Peer support and training to ensure equal skills

• Feed social media approaches into wider context of organisation

• Regularly review content and highlight successes

Is it all even worth it?

• YES!

• Free and easy to use services

• Going to where our users are

• Keeping our services fun and informative

• Crowdsourcing existing content to our advantage

• Small pockets of users add up to wider coverage overall

• It’s quite fun to do…hopefully!

Thank you!