[Michlib-l] Social Media - an exercise in frustration

Tue Nov 16 16:17:25 EST 2021

We are an academic library, so our audience is a little different and have other things on their mind, but we have found that when we post our faces, we get a lot of attention. For example, we did a week-long series during Banned Book Week with staff and faculty holding a copy of their chosen banned or challenged book, along with a description of the book if they desired. Another one was posting photos staff members during National Library Week and what they do at the library as well as anything else the staff member wanted to say about themselves. Our users seem to like this a lot. I'm sure there are other opportunities to highlight staff.

I don't know how that might work in public libraries or other academic libraries -- I do understand there are often safety issues involved.

In our case as well, we have much more activity on Instagram than on Facebook -- I don't think so many college kids are on Facebook, or at least don't use it as a primary social media site.

Overall though -- our users don't really engage with us on social media (faculty who follow us will do so). Maybe college kids just think it's weird?

________________________________
From: Michlib-l <michlib-l-bounces at mcls.org> on behalf of Mark Morton via Michlib-l <michlib-l at mcls.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2021 3:50 PM
To: Andrea Ingmire <aing at pwpl.info>
Cc: michlib-l at mcls.org <michlib-l at mcls.org>
Subject: Re: [Michlib-l] Social Media - an exercise in frustration

Hi Andrea,
We do pretty good on Facebook. We are doing a county wide community read and have an author event via Zoom tomorrow night (Angeline Boulley, "Fire Keeper's Daughter) in association with the other three Leelanau County Libraries. I boosted that post because our measure of the event being worth the expense of the author and moderator will be based on how many attend, so I was hoping to build that audience.
I did an "organic" post of some pictures from a Friends event from last week and we got a reach of 785, with 141 engagements, including shares, comments, likes, and clicks on the pictures. For a small library like ours that is quite a lot of interaction. I think it helped that the pictures were such that they stood out on a feed.
I don't see many of our library posts on my personal news feed but I always figured that is because I am one of the admins for the page.
So much comes down to the mysterious and magical "Facebook algorithm". I have liked and followed several other libraries and whenever I see any of their posts I make sure to interact with them (like, share, comment) since I know the algorithm will send posts that it senses are getting a reaction out to a wider audience, so I see that as a way to help our peers. In some cases I can change my identity and like a post as myself and then do it again as the library. Also with the algorithm in mind all of our posts have at least pictures, since, as you know, pictures and videos get a much farther reach than just text.
I think we continue to do well on Facebook because we have had a lot of interaction in the past and because of that we get put in front of more people right from the start when we post something. I also share our posts with several local group's pages that have a pretty good reach also.
For us it is all well worth the time.

Mark

On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 2:46 PM Andrea Ingmire via Michlib-l <michlib-l at mcls.org<mailto:michlib-l at mcls.org>> wrote:

How are your social media stats looking? I’m growing more and more concerned with our social media profiles all the time. We seem to be reaching a very small audience (Facebook stats say we’re reaching hundreds with each post, but we’re seeing very little, if any, interaction with our posts). It’s very different than in the past.

Interestingly, today we found that our hours were listed incorrectly. It took several attempts to change this, and at some point during the changes Facebook created a posting for us saying that we’d changed our hours. A link for ‘more info’ was provided…and this link took patrons right to a dead paypal page. We had more engagements from this post than from many of our intentional posts of late. Nice work facebook.

I don’t ever see our library’s posts (or any of your libraries for that matter) come up in my feed. If I’m not seeing it, neither are our patrons.

Is it worth staff time to continue using these platforms to promote library services?

Is anyone looking ahead and thinking that it might make more sense to stop spending so much staff time and energy in social media and instead focus on what we can control, like our website, constant contact eNewsletters, and direct mailing?

If social media seems to still be popping for you, what platforms are getting you the best engagement? Are you paying for postings?

Thanks!

Andrea

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Andrea Ingmire

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--
Mark Morton
Director
Leland Township Public Library
203 E Cedar St
PO Box 736
Leland, MI 49654
231-256-9152
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