 And we are always excited to hear from you folks knowing that some of your situations may be different, but we welcome all of you here. And we know that most of our attendees come from public libraries but excited to see some academic folks here as well as school folks, folks from state libraries, special libraries, consortiums, and many that represent other organizations, nonprofit organizations in their community. So we're really excited to have you here today. I also wanted to be sure that folks know there are a number of resources that have been collected, especially for this session today. There is a learner guide that is available for everyone to use either in conjunction with the series, work between the series, this is a tool for you to learn together with your colleagues, your volunteers, some action steps for you to take. There's also a social media starter kit that TechSoup has created that we encourage folks to explore as another set of tools to take your learning further. And also there is a worksheet that Jessica has created specific to today's some of the activities that she recommends in terms of exploring your social media presence on Facebook. So all of those resources are available on the event page and I'm going to actually put that link in here fresh so that you can see that's the one-stop shop for all the resources. We will be adding all of the resources that you all bring to the conversation as well to that resource page so no need to take vigorous notes, we'll be sharing those with you on that page. We also in conjunction with the series have created a survey that we've been using to collect your experiences with social media. There is a survey, the survey will remain live actually through December 19th and Molly actually has done an excellent job of providing a snapshot of the and I'll put that link in there as well, lots of links to share today for you to take a peek at where we are so far with the series with the surveys but there were 311 respondents when we kind of took that first collection of the survey respondents, there are 400 respondents as of today and we look forward to collecting even more data that we will put into a report at the beginning of the year so no this is another way for you to participate in the series and this is just a snapshot of one of the questions and we're hoping to tap into some of these examples of how you in libraries are using social media so know that we'll be continuing to collect your responses there but this has provided us with some excellent information to create the sessions today so I also wanted to just give a little nod to our web junction social media we follow your social media presence on Facebook in libraries we actually have been doing it for 94 I just published today's edition 94 volumes which cover a number of different actually over 400 libraries are featured in this social library series and I just wanted to point it out because it's a really great way for you to see how libraries are using Facebook we actually have a spreadsheet that we update each week that sorts the ways sort of the topics around each of the social library examples so if you're looking for instance for programming inspiration you can go to that spreadsheet look and sort by the different programming efforts and it's a easy easy way to get inspired by your colleagues in the library field I also wanted to point out that web junction hosts the geek the library page on Facebook and we have a number of folks both within libraries and library supporters that are have liked and follow this page and as we talk about content generators folks that you can on Facebook libraries that you can get inspired by I know that Jessica is going to be talking a lot about content generators we'd love to see you use that content from Geek the Library on Facebook all right we are ready to begin our presenters today I'm really excited that Amy Hitchner is here today with us she comes to us from the Colorado State Library as the collaborative programming coordinator and also Jessica Bacon who is the executive editor and founder of the five-minute librarian a wonderful wonderful resource for libraries to follow and we'll get that link in chat as well and I'm so pleased to have Amy kick us off today welcome Amy thanks Jennifer glad I got my technical issues fixed hopefully and I'm back up and running so I want to I want to welcome everyone here today I'm honored to be here with you like Jessica said I'm the collaborative programming coordinator at the Colorado State Library and since November of 2016 I have been coordinating the State Library social media so like many of you here I am also a learner and so I'm you know I'm not I wasn't born and bred a social media marketer by any by any stretch of the imagination I'm learning along with everyone and today I want to present a high-level overview of how to get set up and running with social media if you are in fact the the person at your library or maybe you're on the team at your library that's just getting started so as we go along many of the resources and tools that I mentioned are linked on a final slide which are also on the event page for today's event so as we go along here a couple of objectives objectives to keep in mind what we're going to be doing is learning how to make a basic social media plan to maximize your limited resources and staff time I realized that many of you here are from small or rural libraries which hold a special place in my heart in Colorado we have pockets of these libraries around the state and the energy is in fantastic just love going out there so these are some ideas if you are in limited staff time and budget to just get you up and running we're going to talk about some resources that are useful to first-time social media managers and or content creators and then at the very end we're going to learn some very basic high-level graphic design principles that you can use when you are creating content because image-based content is very important in social media okay so what is social media in my mind it is the digital space where you interact with your community and it's really a modern-day expectation that businesses that organizations have a social media presence and it's different from other marketing tools in that it's not just for pushing information it's not just me telling you about the things going on in the library but it's also for an engagement with your community and that's really the key part of social media is that you are trying to reach your community members in a meaningful ways that they engage with your posts so that they feel connected to your organization your patrons can really be your best advocates online so if you put something out there on Facebook on Twitter on Instagram and your patrons pick it up and retweet it share it like it whatever it is they are becoming your your mouthpiece and there's legitimacy to that so you really want to encourage those kind of interactions social media is also a great space to reinforce the partnerships that you have with other organizations so for instance the Colorado State Library has partnerships with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and another organization called Get Outdoors Colorado and through our work together we often tag team off of each other social media by liking and retweeting and all those you know fun social media type interactions so you can also show the world what partnerships you have and also collaborate in that space as well so one of the first things that I think a lot of folks the big barrier that comes down is I don't know how to do this I I'm not a social media manager I'm not a marketer I don't I'm a librarian like I was ever trained to do this but my answer especially when it's talking we're talking about those things are just a little bit outside of our comfort zone or a little bit outside of what we were trained to do is well it's a good thing that we're librarians and that our superpower is learning we can learn all kinds of things that can help us and this is really no exception so if you are in a situation where your library wants to get started with social media my my big my big message to you is you can just jump in and start you don't need to be an expert you don't need to have a budget you don't need to have a history of doing this what you do need though is to go and find where the energy is in your organization you need to find out who is really excited to be a megaphone for your library and regardless of that person's title or position you need to harness that energy because that person is going to be always looking for ways to make your library present on presence on social media more engaging and more interactive so that's almost exactly what happened in my situation we had an employee that left the state library she was managing social media accounts and when that that sort of role became available I said I would love to do it I would love to tell the world the amazing things that are happening at the Colorado State Library and I would love to help tell the world about the incredible things happening in the state of Colorado so I took that on and I gathered a team together so that would be my number one piece of advice is to don't let the I don't know how stop you you just need to find where the energy is at and eventually the expertise will come also leverage some of your community so if you have a teen group if you have a digital photography group if you have folks who are coming into your library regularly that are excited find ways to harness that resource those people can also help you in this endeavor so let's talk about an overarching social media plan we're going to go into each of these a little bit more detail but when you talk about creating a social media plan you're going to have a couple different elements you're going to have your team it could be just you although I discourage I discourage it just being one person for reasons I'll go into in just a moment but you want to assemble your team you want to define some goals determine what your budget is plan to plan so make sure you get those meetings on the books you're going to gather your content and to schedule it regularly and you want to make sure that you are feeding and watering your social media we'll talk about what that is going to look like and then finally you want to make sure that you're sort of completing the loop by going back and looking at your analytics making sure that the efforts that you're making are actually producing something and if they're not can you change tactics a little bit so that's your overarching plan and this might look a lot like other plans that you make for other parts of your library life and that's because social media really shouldn't be something that's outside of what you normally do it should be something that you incorporate into other planning along with your marketing and your programs and your events and your outreach and all that stuff so it shouldn't look too scary or different from what you've encountered before okay so assembling your team again I encourage you to go where your energy is expertise can be learned but motivation is very hard to conjure for a sinner find who those people are that are excited about your library and what it's doing that that want to tell the world and that want to engage more people in an online space when you are assembling your team you want to make sure that you're agreeing on your roles and expectations this is like a project management tip if if the folks on your team don't really understand what their role in that team is things can get a little messy so in our team we have folks from different areas of the state library that meet once a month and they are sort of like my content people so they come and we all have a roundtable discussion and we talk about things that are going on on their teams or in the state library in general do they need to be on social media what's the timeline and then we just start building our content from there so those are my content creators and then I'm more of the planning it and getting you know where the rubber hits the road getting it actually out onto the channel and monitoring the channels but if I didn't have that amazing team of folks who came every month and helped me build that content I wouldn't know everything that's going on and all the different facets of the state library that I need to be talking about those folks also bring news from other areas of Colorado that they may have been working in to say hey did you know that a library down in Durango or up in Greeley is doing something awesome and we work that in as well so make sure you assemble your team and make sure that you agree on roles and expectations this is also very important when you're setting up your account access so each social media channel does something a little bit has a different way of managing different roles it might be like an administrator and then an editor and then a contributor or something like that so you need to make sure that you understand who has which role when you're setting up those accounts and to document that so that you know if you in the lottery and you leave tomorrow someone has something written down of who all these people are and what their relationship is to those accounts okay so defining your goals to avoid a just because syndrome so we want to be on Twitter just because that's just what we do and you want to avoid that you want to choose things that are more strategic that are tied to your goals that align with any overarching marketing goals that your organization might have you could you should also take into consideration your your intended audience when you create your goals who are you trying to reach is there a specific age range any of those sort of things and it can be a specific or as broad as you want to be but I do encourage you to define your goals otherwise every new shiny wonderful thing that comes along you're going to try and do it rather than saying you know what no we're going to try this for a little while and we're going to look at our analytics and then we're going to go from there so be be a little more strategic about it our goals at the State Library are to educate excite and engage and our our specific target audience isn't the general public it is other librarians in Colorado because of the nature of our organization we are support agency we are state level and so our primary audience are other librarians and not necessarily the general public but depending on what type of organization you're from that could be you know it could be different so again it's a good conversation to have with your team with your own manager and just with your organization in general is what are we trying to do and who are we trying to reach with social media okay so this is a reason this is an example of how what not to do with your goals and your goals shouldn't be to just use all the social media platforms there's so many I want to do them all I want to have the biggest reach I want to be on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the things that's a really terrible idea for a couple of reasons you're going to spread yourself really thin for one thing and I'm assuming that if we're talking small budgets small staff time you just really don't have you don't have the resources to spread yourself over that many platforms also you're going to find that certain platforms reach certain audiences differently and and so you know your time spent on Pinterest might not be the best idea but maybe Instagram works better some of that is just trial and error but I encourage you to maybe start small maybe pick two that seem like the best fit and study your analytics and then go from there so for instance the State Library is on Facebook and we're also on Twitter Facebook is of course you know it's ubiquitous everybody's on Facebook it seems like so that's going to be sort of our big bang for our buck Twitter is a little bit more of an experiment it's more of a newsfeed look and feel we're noticing that numbers you know across Twitter in general are starting to decline a little bit so maybe we might look at trying something else in the future maybe we might look at Instagram because it's more photo-based and it's very quickly you know it's growing very quickly it's you just hear a lot more buzz about it but we started small with two and we're going to grow from there and see if we need to cut out any as we go along and as far as choosing platforms I would say that while each has its strengths and its weaknesses there's no one-size-fits-all we find that in different parts of the state what one platform you know one platform might be reaching a specific target group very well you cross to the other side of the state and it doesn't do well Pinterest might do well in Jefferson County and not well in La Plata County but that's really the experiment part of it and why I encourage you to look at your analytics as you keep going okay so another part of the plan that you're going to put together is your budget now you could have a budget of zero dollars and I will tell you that our budget at the state library for social media right now is zero dollars we're making it work we're making it happen and you can get it done with a few extra dollars however you could do a few extra things you could buy a subscription to iStock or some other stock photo website and get some nicer stock photo images that you could use when you're creating your graphics you could also pay for Facebook advertising which is actually not as expensive as you might think sometimes it's three dollars to five dollars a day to boost certain posts up and I have heard from other libraries in our state that are doing that that it works very very well so you know if you had just a little bit of a budget you could pay for some Facebook advertising another way if you had a little bit of extra money is you could upgrade to the pro subscription of some design tools that you might use like canva is a fantastic design tool like graphic design tool for creating images and things like that but they have one of those subscription services where there's a free version and then there's like a paid version and the paid version of course is much nicer so you could have that or if you're on Hootsuite or some other management tool you could then pay to upgrade to the pro version so there's another way to use those extra dollars and then if you have even a little bit more you could pay a graphic designer to help you design some of the templates that you use on social media so that things look really nice and sharp again you don't need any of those things but they are nice to have if you have just a little bit of budget okay so plan to plan this is pretty straightforward make sure that your social media team is meeting regularly so that you are all on the same page with what are the campaigns that we are going to be focusing on this month what's the content what's happening in your team do we need to schedule certain types of tweets or posts about it just make sure that you're meeting regularly again we meet once a month but that might not work for your team you can make sure to plan whatever works best for your environment with the amount of people that you have it could be less formal more formal that's really up to you but do make sure that you get something regular on the books and then this is my favorite part the content calendar this is a trick that I learned at the library marketing and communications conference that happens every year it's put on by amigos and it's in Dallas it's coming up in November if you have the budget to send somebody to that I encourage you to go it was very very hands-on and useful very useful but the big takeaway I got from that conference was you need to make a content calendar and it can be very simple ours is a google sheet somebody asked what the conference was library marketing and communications conference so make sure you make a content calendar it could be an excel spreadsheet it could be a google sheet but whatever it is you need to make sure that you're documenting your content and planning it and I'll show you on the next slide an example of what that looks like but it does a few things you can use it to schedule posts ahead of time which is a huge time saver in the long run it also helps you spread the content apart so if you are scheduling three related posts you want to make sure they're not like you know the the sit in a or the other if if you want to kind of spread out for three weeks let's say so your content calendar helps you visually see when everything is scheduled it can also help you plan out the more static regular type posts and then when you go in for your daily check-in of your social media sites then you can spice it up with little memes or fun stuff that you might find that day something a little more timely and current so I definitely encourage you to make a content calendar and to make sure that that content calendar is accessible to every person on your team and that can again look very different depending on where you are in the technology you have available we use google sheets and we just share it amongst ourselves you could also just put it in an excel spreadsheet and put that on a shared drive somewhere or I mean and if you want to go low tech it could literally be a piece of paper on a shared space somewhere in your library that's up to you but make sure that your content calendar is shared with everyone on your team a word about your content that you are planning so I mentioned that you want to sort of spice up your regular oh you know like your events and your your kind of regular things with more fun timely stuff my word of caution is to make sure that as you're doing that like you see something awesome and you want to retweet it you want to share it make sure that you have an idea in your head of what your social media voice is for your library because what you you don't want to do is kind of go off the rails and if you typically have more of a straightforward sort of professional tone that you are all of a sudden throwing in weird funny but little bit off the wall or maybe a little bit naughty memes that's not a good idea typically so you really want to make sure that you understand the voice that you're trying to convey for your library and to choose fun and timely content that stays within that voice so that everything seems cohesive and that everybody on your social media team understands sort of what that voice is so that they don't again go off the rails and do something a little more risky and maybe that's what your library is into and maybe that's what they encourage and that's fine but for an organization like us we're a state agency we have to be a little more conservative about what we put out there the other tip I would say about writing the actual posts was is to focus on the content rather than the event details in other words lead with the punchline so this is not a press release this is how this is different than a regular marketing job I'm not just telling everybody about events coming up I'm trying to make them stop and read and by by giving them the punchline first it gives them a moment to say wait a minute I might want to do that so for example here's two different tweets that I'd compose and one of them is more marketing and one's more content based so the first example is our next webinar is October 23rd okay great so we have a webinar it's October 23rd not many people are going to stop on that but a different way to put it hey library services for seniors and those with memory loss watch our free webinar on October 23rd I put the content the part that's going to grab people at the beginning because as they're scrolling through their feed that's what they're going to see first so lead with the punchline so here's an example of what our shared social media calendar looks like and you can see it's very basic we just have a row for if it's been scheduled or whether it's been done the date the channel that it's going out on cvl is our blog facebook twitter libnet is a an email mailing list we have and then the actual post content and then there's some other columns about like do we need to include a link or an image or that kind of thing but as you can see it is literally a spreadsheet and that's you know it's it's as easy as that so I encourage you to explore the tools that you have available and see what's going to work for your library okay so feed and water your social media channels regularly so this is about creating your workflow all right um social media does not have to be time intensive but it does need to be consistent so when I took over our facebook page we were at about 540 likes and that was in November of 2016 about six months later we were up to 600 likes and really you know we like I said I was getting started I was a learner everybody on the team was learning it wasn't like we were creating these you know amazing posts with all the clickbait and all that stuff we were the only thing we were trying to do was make sure we were posting at least one thing every day that's it so we just tried to post one thing whether it was scheduled or whether it was sort of in the moment we tried to get something out every single day of the week and just by doing that just by showing our audience that we were there and we were waving at them and saying hello the state libraries here all of a sudden we went up from 540 to 600 likes and I think now we're up to about 650 um so it is it it really just is about being consistent and I don't think there's a magic number with how many posts honestly you can look at your you can look at your analytics and see you know what's working for you but it's really better that you be consistent than it is that you that you create like 10 amazing posts per day and my tip on that is to make sure you're using a scheduling tool you can use tweet deck you can use Hootsuite there's all these fun crazy you know internet type names out there but find yourself a good scheduling tool I tend to go back and forth between tweet deck and then just whatever is internal to Facebook they have like their own internal scheduling component I get in there once a week I schedule a bunch of stuff out so I don't have to worry about that and then every day I just drop in for five or 10 or 15 minutes to see what's happening respond like comment do sort of that regular maintenance and then that's it so that could be if all you have is an hour for scheduling posts and 10 minutes a day for checking in on your accounts that could be your social media time for the week plus your meetings with your team monthly so it really is not it doesn't have to be super time intensive now can you get in there and just lose yourself of course but if all you have is just a little bit of time every day you can get it done and then finally and this is what I need to get better at frankly analytics so you need to refine what's working and what is not each of these platforms has their own internal analytics they're they're great you know they help you see how many views how many engagements how many likes all that stuff so when you're meeting with your social media team I encourage you to sit down also with them and show them okay here's our month of October and here's here are our numbers here's how it can sound to last month's numbers what do you think accounted for this what kinds of posts we're getting good feedback can we do more of that in the future and really I feel like that's just that's that's a pretty easy thing that most of us can do even if we're not super library you know data geeks but you can of course go down a rabbit hole and get really crazy with it kind of just depends on what your team's into okay so that was the basic social media plan can you get more complex yes you can do you need to not not at the beginning I really don't think you do so let's pause for a second and talk now about social media graphics why they matter and how you can create better ones so your social media presence is going to be primarily image driven it's not to say that you don't have text content but what's going to stop people as they're scrolling through their feeds are very compelling images so you need to figure out how to make yours better or more compelling if you're DIYing your social media you're probably DIYing your graphics too and sometimes homegrown designs can look a little homegrown I've been guilty of it myself but when I started creating a little bit better graphics I noticed we started getting better clicks so we're going to talk about some very very basic high-level graphic design things you can put into place today no matter what tool you're using it could be adobe photoshop which I don't know how to use I never learned it but I recommend canva or picto chart or anything that somebody's already paid those graphic designers to design templates for them you should just leverage that like you don't have to go to graphic design school just use it somebody else already does well so when you're creating your graphics or using templates here's some very basic high-level things to keep in mind visual hierarchy and white space okay as librarians I think we tend to think that all the white space is like precious and we need to fill it up as much as possible to make maximum use and that just creates visual clutter so visual hierarchy just means that you need to make the most important things the easiest to see and to be ruthless about decluttering and white space is a compliment to that white space helps the eye move through the design and nowhere to look next so if you can eliminate unnecessary clutter out of your designs and make the most important things the biggest you are on your way to good visual hierarchy so again we're going to move through these pretty quickly but understand that in this case less is usually more and the mistake that many of us make is we try to fill up every single inch of that space or every pixel with something and that's actually going at cross purposes with what you want second is get the word art and clip art out of there if it came from microsoft word in the 90s it does not need to be in your designs anymore get them out just use regular fonts I mean there's some fun fonts out there that's great but just get them out of there it makes it look dated it makes it look like we are kind of stuck back in 1995 and that might be kind of funny if you're doing like a retro theme but for the most part get it out of there use something like an icon instead of a clip art and I have a resource at the end that it's called the noun project that has nice three icons that look classy and not like 90s clip art okay the other part of creating better graphics is use just a few fonts and colors two to three of each you know two to three of each whether it's font or color and here's a great example of a homemade poster that I found gosh I think I found it through the DPLA so this is a great example of somebody doing it themselves and it turned out great they're using red they're using yellow there's a nice neutral background they've used two fonts and that's it you can your eye knows exactly how to move through this page or through this poster and you know even though it's like it's these pictures are somebody you know cut them out and pasted them on they it still looks fabulous I I think this is a great example of a homegrown design done well because they didn't overload the page with too many fonts and too many colors so scale that back really try to focus on what's important and draw the attention with just a few fonts and colors images oh my gosh see these pictures here there's a there's a there's a big difference between the one on the left and the one on the right the one on the left is something that people try to do when they resize images where they just take that little handle on the image and they just drag it to whatever size they want and everything looks stretched and weird my suggestion is to either crop it or to proportionately resize it and here's a pro tip when you click shift and then drag the corner of the image it's going to proportionately resize it you can also click there's usually like a lock aspect ratio button click that so that you don't get those weird stretched images because that says I am an amateur at resizing my images to whoever sees it so crop them or resize them do not stretch them out and then finally templates your new best friends these are templates from canva I've heard I've seen some people in the chat get all crazy and fun about canva I completely agree you need to go check it out they have fantastic templates get in there have fun with templates realize that they've paid graphic designers to do this for them so you don't have to learn how to do it yourself if something doesn't work exactly you can sort of use specific elements and then customize the way you want but start with a template and it's just going to look so much nicer in the long run canva also has templates for the different social media sizes so there's like a twitter post there's a facebook size post there's an instagram post so make sure you're using your templates and you're going to start thinking hey I think I do pretty good in this I look like a graphic designer and your designs will look more professional so use your templates this is that slide I was telling you all about so this will be available on the event events page I encourage you to take a look I have some some images resources and some design tool resources and then some on the left some more learning and training for your for your further learning so I do encourage you to just jump in start learn along the way keep learning and know that you're going to get better as you go along no one's going to be perfect at this the first time out of the gate okay so that's where we are I think I did it a lot of information people have been really busy in chat as well and I just want to reassure people that chat will be available on that resource page so you can refer back to it a couple things I just want to note there were some some questions on some sharing around scheduling tools and I thought this is a perfect example of an article we could write so I'm going to work on collecting some of what was shared in chat but if anyone wants to write an article about scheduling tools let me know and we can publish it within the time frame of the series I'll also mention there were a couple questions about policies around getting photo permissions and that's another topic that surfaced in our survey that we put out and a number of libraries have provided examples of policies both policies for staff as well as policies for the public around social media so I wanted to let you all know that that is coming Amy I'd love to get your thoughts on one question that came up a little bit earlier you know knowing that you've been working with especially libraries perhaps that maybe are just getting started with social media there's a real common occurrence I know that happens where people really have to get buy in in order to either set aside the time to do social media or to even create a social media presence on for their library can you talk a little bit about I know that Sharice mentioned she's going to talk about getting buy in using analytics in the next session but can you just give us some thoughts on how to be able to explain the value that this presence on social media can bring to your library yeah you know I think I think Sharice is going to is going to be able to speak to folks who need to bring numbers to their managers to make it seem like they should go ahead with it there are certain managers that respond to analytics and that kind of thing and there are others who respond to different type of of conversations and motivations luckily in my situation because we already had social media sort of up and running I was able to sort of take it and and go with it but I keep coming back to that this is just a modern day expectation this would be like saying we we need a website and someone else going why do we need a website it's just kind of the modern day expectation of how you interact with folks in your community it would be strange if you were to look up some an organization and find out that they were not on social media at all it would it would just not seem yeah it just it's just a modern day expectation so as far as trying to convince management of something that you weren't already starting I would say start with the analytics but just start with the you know we have a website and this is sort of the extension of where that needs to go I also heard oh she's great she there's a central library manager Denver Denver Public Library central library her name is Rachel fuel and she's fantastic and I remember her saying one time that you know when when we want to communicate with our patrons the the previous way of doing it was we stood in the library and we yelled out onto the street hey everybody on the street look at all the fantastic things we're doing in here and maybe some of them looked up and maybe some of them walked in but social media does is makes you go onto the street and talk to people out there to tell the people on the street hey the library is over here and it's we're doing a great job and we'd love to have you come in so it's really that getting out of your building and connecting with people where they already are people are already in social media you know by the by the millions and billions and just so so the fact that you're not out there interacting with some seems a little bit odd so get out onto the streets get out to where people are and where they're already having conversations that you can talk with them excellent that's great and I saw just one comment is it better to be on uh to better to be on social media and not be good at it or not on social media at all and I loved your suggestion of just starting small you know one post a day or maybe it's one post every three days you know you can start small and I think you'll you'll be surprised at how good how good you could be and I would and I would also add to that if you're there's I mean there are a couple ways where you can be bad at social media but it usually involves like lawyers and stuff though if you have a question about like actual content I would maybe put a pause on it and talk with somebody first but you can't really be bad at it if you're being genuine about wanting to connect with your patrons look at the conversations that they're having how can you help out how can you jump in also look what other libraries are doing and ask yourself what's what's so successful about what they're doing and can I just emulate that I see some folks from Washington State on you know in the webinar today and I'm from Washington originally so I always sort of pay attention but Washington State's library has a fantastic social media presence and a lot of times I sort of just check out what they're doing and see gosh could I could I emulate that in our library um they must have an amazing team over there so can I do some of that and if you're a small library wondering if you should start wondering how to start look at what is successful for other libraries and try to emulate it are they doing a lot of funny stuff are they doing a lot of you know image-based posts like what's working for them and can you try and emulate it in your own community excellent well thank you so much Amy lots and lots to think about and certainly lots to work on so I'm going to actually um move us on over to Jessica's presentation and Jessica's going to dive a little bit more deeply into Facebook which is a great place to start if you have no face or no social media presence so thank you so much for being here Jessica I'll let you get us uh move us on thank you I'm excited to talk about this a few years ago I was working at a public library and our Facebook page you had a reach of like 30 people and I was wondering is that normal am I this is worth my time is this something I can really improve so I did a lot of research and there's not much out there for libraries but there are resources for small businesses and it turns out what works for them works for our libraries because we also have a small staff and we have limited time and we have zero to very small budget and so I used some of the tricks that they were talking about and it made a huge difference in our feed so from 30 which was our best we were getting to like 100 reach per post that we were doing so there is a science behind Facebook and I'm very excited to talk today about it so we're going to talk about three different session objectives number one to understand Facebook's role in social media the science behind it two we'll discuss the different ways that libraries can utilize Facebook for the best outreach and then three I want to help you guys come up with a few resources that you can use to stay on top of it all so that you can reach a lot of your goals without having to do a lot of work so there's a huge push for libraries to be on social media and I think that makes a lot of sense 86% of the United States population is on the internet and eight out of 10 of those are on Facebook so if you're looking for one place to be Facebook's a good starting point for you the other great thing about Facebook is that they have the most people on daily as you can see from the second chart so they're on 50 minutes so the question is how are you going to reach this potential audience with the time you have and the resources that you have so a lot of people think well I have a personal account so I just create a page account from Facebook I don't know exactly what I need to do but that can't be further from the truth your personal account is very different than your page account your personal account looks you as a person you are following people your family and friends other pages other groups and when you post something because your top priority people are going to see it so it doesn't matter how often you post a page is different you can't see other people's accounts you can't connect with them and you're just putting information out there and hoping that people will like it they're structured very differently now a personal account like I said top priority is your friends and family they also reserve a small portion of these posts for informing posts and entertaining posts and that's when your library page posts will come in so you are competing against all the other pages and groups that they're following to try to show up in that small percent the personal account as you react they build up your newsfeed so what you like this appears to be something to show you more about it if you do something you don't like you can easily hide or follow yourself page account is a lot different you can post as much as you want but not all of it gets through in fact organic reach is down to two to six percent of your followers the more people who actually like your page the smaller your organic reaches so if you have a hundred thousand followers two percent is more likely for those of you who have smaller followers you can be happy about that I mean if you have more people are going to be seeing your posts in the bigger pages but because you're trying to get through with all the other pages that are posting you need to post often it's really important and those posts have to do well if people like your posts you're going to get better reach if they don't like your posts if they don't interact with that at all then your post is going to get less reach the next time you post on there so it's really important that you understand what an engaging post is and how to be social on facebook one of the best things about a page account is that you have the facebook insights where you can track and measure results and hopefully tweak it to make it work to your advantage it's not switching over up there yeah so the average user gets 1500 posts a day in their feed on average so facebook had to come up with an algorithm to find out what would work best and what people really want to see and then all the posts that they're not interested in needs to fade away otherwise people won't stay on facebook that long so we tech crunch just find four factors that are very important and sorry and um and it's important that you pay attention to those because it will help you with your future posts so see for the creator facebook has attention to the person who is posting the content so there are three of you posting on facebook and one person tends to get a lot of great results and I know the people who get less results the person who get the higher reach actually does better when they do the next post even though you someone else does the same topic so it makes a big difference your post is really important too they show it to a small percentage of people and if they really like it and they're interacting well they're going to show it to more people throughout that day and the next time you post they're going to show more of that post to people to your followers and then they found that people kind of like certain types of posts better so it might be a status it might be a photo it might be a video and so if your post is a video they're more likely to show it to your followers who like videos or your followers or if you're doing an article then the followers that like articles so you need to find out what works best for your followers and what most of them like and then recency is really important facebook doesn't want to be old news so if you post once a week and then your followers only log in once a week and you posted six days ago they're never going to see any of your posts now these are just four factors that they pulled out that we really know about but facebook actually looks at a hundred thousand other factors so there's a lot of things that go into the algorithm so it's a lot of work and but once you get the science to it it's going to be a whole lot easier for for me there are seven factors I think that are important that if you follow it gives you a successful facebook page so for us we found that you know we could reach a hundred organic reach so that was always our goal now I did tell you that organic reach is down to two to six percent of your followers so if you're not hitting that but you're within two to six percent you're doing as well as other pages however I have found that libraries seem to do better than businesses do so if you can strive for the law 100 you will make it more worthwhile of your time I just as Amy has said consistent posting is really important at least once a day but if you can do twice a day we'll talk about that a little more but whatever you post it has to be engaging it has to be something that people will ever respond to so make sure your follower interaction is important do they like it do they share it do they comment on it if someone does they comment on your page you want to make sure that you respond back to it so that they feel acknowledged and that you're you're part of the community they're not just out there and encourages them to comment again now facebook now tells people how fast you respond to messages you want to make sure that you're you're kind of on top of it you can have your facebook set up that you get an email when someone messages you so you can hop on and respond and then your images are also really important facebook is is big on both desktop and mobile so using an image that works looks good for both of them it's really ideal so that you look very professional and then the easiest thing you can do is your url facebook gives you facebook.com slash a whole bunch of random numbers you go into your settings you can update that and then you can put your library name into it and so people can easily find you later on so you can do this it takes some time but once you get the science behind it you can stay on top of it jennifer are you seeing any questions not anything right now no it's been a little quieter they're they're listening very closely okay all right so i'm going to move on to nine ways that you can maximize your reach and try to hit that 100 so number one you have to post often we usually say once in the morning something serious and then once in the evening something fun but make sure you post every single day not just when you're in the office because again only a small percentage of your posts are getting through so you need to make sure that you're generating a lot so that you are getting through to a lot of your followers now this may seem overwhelming you definitely don't want to try to sign in every single day and do this on the fly so like amy had said you want having a content calendar is really important so carve out sometimes sit down and schedule ahead and plan what you're going to do for next week or two and try to plan things that you aren't creating yourself find other resources that you can reshare because that's so important if you're going to stay on top of this and we'll talk more about that later i also highly recommend signing up for google alerts you can do it for your library name you can do it for the town or city your library is in and they'll let you know when things are posted about it so if you have like an article published about your library that's great content that you can use on social media and reshare you know what's going on around your your town your area you can post about that too because everyone who's following you are patrons and they live in that area and they're interested in it so you can use that as well i also highly recommend if this done that which lets you automate your posts and connect your different social media accounts if you want help sitting on top of that so you live and die by clicks this is so important to understand so make sure you're only posting engaging content you don't want to post your press release so you don't want to post something that only interests a small sliver of your patrons like an esl class you're not going to get a lot responses from a lot of your followers so facebook is not the place where you want to put it you want to make sure whatever you put online you're going to get a like an emotion a comment a share clicks to read watch later and even you know if someone says they love your post that scores higher than just a general like so all of this really matters to your current post and how many people are going to see it and then the next time you post it matters how many people facebook's going to show it to now a lot of people don't like to hear just about one person talking about themselves and libraries are the same thing we've fallen that we can't just talk about ourselves we need to share content on our shared values so what do libraries share with their patrons a love for reading information about authors book humor things going on in our community these are things you can tap into and post on that your page and help you reach your goal of reach or posting two things a day in my library articles on reading was really big information on authors especially their new books pictures with book humor those things had done really well and helped boost up our our reach that we've had so what do we mean by an engaging post sometimes you just have to be creative with how you get the information out there so in one example the first one there was only one like for the story time the second picture that came out a few days later had 22 likes and there's a big difference between the two the first one is like an ad and it has a generic picture and really the only people who are likely to respond to this are caregivers who have a kid between the age three to six who is available on that Wednesday to come to this particular program so it didn't do very well the second one also talks about a program but the picture has this cute adorable dog watching a kid trying to learn how to read suddenly people who had no reason to respond to a story time now had a reason to and so a lot of people love the post and I like the post and it did really well so make sure that your post and the right kind of pictures and you're framing it in a way that will make people want to respond and if you can't find a way to do it it just doesn't belong on Facebook now a lot of people don't want to post fluff on their Facebook pages and needs to be only about the library and needs to be just about us but you're hurting yourself in so many different ways you need to post the fun things because Facebook is a social media network can you do social on it and these fun things are the reason why people click and why people respond so you want to use that to help increase your reach so when you do have to post something that's important say your clothes on a snow day more people are going to see it because you already kept your reach up really high so this can mean you can post pictures and encourage people to comment on it sharing about their reading you do have a mascot you can do it and find interesting ways so people have a chance to last and respond to it a lot of people have pictures of kids and reading quotes so you can use those to your advantage you can also talk about bookworms and reading problems and funny things a lot of stuff out there that you can reuse and post and it always gets a lot of great response from readers another thing you can do is talk about the history of your town or city and post pictures up on it and if you can tag another page like the historical society you can automatically double your reach because the historical society and your followers get to see this another great thing about that particular post is that um you have a lot of pictures so the people have to click through pictures which means they're interacting with your post so if you do a bunch of pictures and um and put it in one post you're actually helping yourself because you're encouraging people to react to it even if they don't like it after they click through the pictures and then lastly the holidays you know try to do it in a fun way people do a lot of creative things with books to celebrate the holidays and you can make your own or you can share someone else's but a lot of patrons love that and they will respond to it positively and again that keeps your reach up and um and keeps you going so don't kiss and tell don't free Facebook like a library bulletin board only post the things on there that are social that you know or you hope at least we'll get an interaction um that could work for the general the the largest group that you have posted on there and if you can do that you keep that frame of mind you're going to see an increase in your reach and you're going to see it consistently stay up now I'm going to talk about engaging posts you talked about posting about your programs I don't recommend actually doing a post about a program what you really want to use is your Facebook event and you want to make that so it Facebook treats it a lot different and they did a great job making changes to it to make it really relevant so focus on your big events don't do your weekly ones because it can get overwhelming if people see too many events but then what people can do is they can mark that they're interested in it and then it will show up in their Facebook calendar and then when they get close to the date Facebook will send them a reminder and you don't even have to do it I know for my friends whenever they like their children's event I see it in my news feed so it reaches me too and then I can mark on it when they're interested or not so it's a great great powerful tool that you can use about an event it doesn't mean you can't post later you can show a picture of how it went but um but if you really want to get the word out Facebook events is the place you want to be the one problem I heard about this is that Facebook allows people to mark if they're going or not and sometimes patrons have a hard time understanding that they um that they haven't actually registered for the program they have to go to your library's website and do that so it might take a little bit of growing pains to kind of get through that just pay attention to who's saying they're going and if they signed up already and you can also put messages on the event saying that you need to make sure you register at the library to actually count for the registration numbers but it's a powerful tool and I highly recommend using it that way for your weekly programs though what I would do is do a general post and have a really awesome picture something that pulls up the hard strings and just kind of casually mention oh this is a weekly program feel free to come and join us but you don't want to do every single program that your library offers or people will stop following you so one of the best things you can do especially for the person who doesn't have a lot of free time is re-sharing content and this actually works to your benefit in so many different ways because if you share something on Facebook that guy is really high-reach you're going to get an automatic Facebook bump and get a high-reaching normally yet because this post is true than quality content people like this people are interacting with it they don't feel like it's spam and the Facebook website you're doing that so you need to work on a page feed get posts from other libraries and then you can re-share those and fill up all of your calendar without having to take the time out to create every little thing that you post so we mentioned a page feed a few times basically what you do is you visit a page and then you click on the down arrow on like and you can like it as your page then when you go to your home page to your library page underneath how many people are following you is your page feed which I marked with that yellow arrow pointing to it so you click on that that brings you to the second image which shows you all the pages that you like and it shows you their news feed and what they're posting about now I noticed in the other presentation all I think I was saying let's follow each other's libraries you will want to do it this way and follow them as your page and not as a person because if you are following them as a person and you don't respond to their posts then you're hurting them because then then their percentage is going down of how many people like their posts but you can't like a post someone like or comment on a post as your page so it's okay to do it through the page and you're not going to hurt their numbers so I highly recommend doing it that way now in your Facebook insights you also have an option of pages to watch and so you the ones that you see are doing really well and keep doing content that you really want to share you want to put them into this category and then when you click on their name on the hyperlink you will it will bring you to the image on the right and you can see what the best their top posts are for that week so it's really easy for you to get quality content really fast now andrew lines the time stamp which is underneath their name that will give you a URL that you can use to share to schedule a share later because if you click on the share bottom down it will share all automatically so it's not going to help you if you're trying to plan out for the week but that timestamp is super important now I started a shareable click Facebook group if you're doing a lot of social media posts this might be some place you want to be they have over 2000 people who are in this group 2000 libraries and basically we all share our top performing posts if they're generic you're welcome to share on your own page if it's specific to that particular library it might be a good learning opportunity like I know one library had posted about okay left behind the stuffed animal and they did it too did you know can you help us find the owner sort of thing it went viral for them so if you happen to get that later now you know what to do and you can use that that strategy for your own page now here on the Facebook group you don't want to click the timestamp because if you do and you share that post you're going to get the librarian posting that how wonderful this post had done you don't really want to show that part so it's really important that you click on the word post which you'll see at the end yes right there and and that will bring you to the original post where you see you know we couldn't resist pumpkin spice everything and that's something you do want to share on your own page so that's what you want to do the other great thing about the shareable click is it's good for crowdsourcing ideas if you don't know what to do for an upcoming holiday you can ask to do other people's plans and then you can either get inspired from it or maybe even share back and forth for things that you can use so you talked about a lot of what you can do on your page and hoping that it gets through to people but there are things you can do to reach out as well you can do it as your page but as your personal account you can join Facebook groups for your local schools in your town or city and I highly recommend doing that a lot of people are on Facebook as we start from the beginning from a few century search and if you get to learn what's going on around you and then you can use it to your advantage so like in our city if you we have on business Mondays so Mondays you can post about library programs and things going on and that'd be totally okay and you get to know what's going around the town too schools are great way for reaching parents I was a teen librarian and we had a writing competition and we tripled how many people participated because we advertised in the local schools Facebook groups and it was just a great way for us to reach parents to then encourage your teens to participate so you can use that to your advantage don't do it too often but you know I could talk about some reading you can talk about your big programs during all of the breaks during the year and and it'd be a good way to reach people who don't normally come to the library another thing you can do is if you get a lot of likes on your page you can actually click on the the name and the number of likes on the particular post and it brings you to this picture that I pulled up right here and you get to see how many of those people are actually following your page so you can invite them to actually like your page so it might be one way if you increase followers on people who actually like your content but they haven't taken that extra step themselves to go and like it now if they already like your page you'll notice it's great and it says late and straight out so you can't you can't invite them so it's one way to know it you might find some people are listed as an invite and like wow they like all my posts I'm pretty sure they're following me and they probably are but Facebook has privacy settings and so they're if they had it locked down it won't tell you that but Facebook only lets you invite them once so you're not to worry about spamming anyone. Now this technique only works for the pages that have up to a hundred thousand followers so if you're beyond that you can't do that and it only works with posts that have a lot of likes so if only one or two people like it it won't give you that option but if it proves them all together then you can click on that link and have that option so I heard a lot of libraries found this very useful and has worked for them and I know we don't want to spend money advertising but I have heard great things about advertising on Facebook and so if you want to give it a shot it might be worth your time it's not that expensive and you can also limit to a particular age group a particular location even a gender if you have a particular program that you're doing so you can really reach your target group fast a lot better than posting a lot of other places and then let's say you boost a post you can go to the post that got a lot of likes and then do what we just said for number two and you can invite those non-fans to actually follow up and like your page so you can use that to your advantage. Jessica can I just ask a really quick question someone asked if that invite to request or the request to invite does that show up as your page or as you as an individual the invite it shows up as your page okay that's the goodness and it comes in and pops up as a notification so they'll get a notification that's on their login that this page had asked them to like them however there is I believe if you're friends with that person it will default to you but if you're not friends with that person then it would be your page okay good question so a few months ago Facebook allows you to connect your groups to a particular page so this is kind of awesome groups is something I think libraries should look into and really consider they get a higher priority on the new feed than a page does notifications will appear sometimes from the groups so they'll get periodic notifications that things you're posting it will give you a chance to really divide up your audience so if you want to do a children's group or a teen group an adult group or maybe you want to do one that's focused on a particular program like a book or whatever then you can just share things from your page that is specific to them that you think they would really like to see you wouldn't have to post everything all day because groups don't need that to to be level and people's news feed and you can comment and like as your page so people don't know who you are they don't have to wonder why is just responding to everything you know you can respond as your page and look really professional and the other newest thing that they added so mms can now create and schedule post ahead of time so you don't have to do the group page whenever you want to post you can get that done earlier and this might be the way of the future I am hearing that this book is decreasing organic reach and they they're actually doing an experiment now where all Facebook pages are going to be in a different news feed and only those who are paid are going to be in the general news feed so this might be something that libraries would want to consider if they do end up going that road so that you can still be active on Facebook without having to pay money every time you want to reach people words really matter on Facebook their algorithm pays attention to it so you want to make sure you avoid specific words like buy sale click win all those get marked as banning advertisements Facebook doesn't want to do that so if you're posting about your book sales you want to make sure you're very creative in how you work that so you don't automatically get a decrease in your reach however Facebook highlights your milestones so you can talk about work anniversaries you can talk about author birthdays you can hit retirement and using those particular words will give you an automatic boost so I know in December we're going to be talking about looking at your statistics analytics and the webinar and I highly recommend you guys all sign up for that but it is important for increasing your outreach so I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about it today so the number one thing you need to do is just try a variety of content you know you said one of the big factors is the post type that you're using so you need to find out what is the majority of your followers actually liking and then those are the ones that you tried to get into your news feed a lot and then times of day make a big difference you know it could be that the mornings do better for you that night so then you need to kind of plan and decide how you want to do your post and then the length of the post the character count video time those all make a difference whether or not people pause and read what you're posting are they ignore it and keep on going through so you need to really spend a month or two trying a bunch of different things and see what actually works and then using that to your advantage later now your Facebook insights could be helpful they like to tell you how many people on my of your followers are on per day and what time the day they tend to be on I have never found it helpful for me this is what my pages look like it's basically the same number of people are on every single day and from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. it's the same number of people on so trying to experiment and see what works true really helps I can't tell you a lot of people say 1 to 3 p.m. is the most popular time people are on Facebook however if you post during that time you have a higher amount of competition against all the other pages so you may not get through the competition to be post during then if you post early in the morning right before people wake up you might hit all the people who hop online and want to quickly look through Facebook before they start their day so you really need to experiment and see what works for you the one that does work really well for me is that they give you the statistics on your post and they tell you how well it's done your reach they tell you the day so you can see Monday Tuesdays Wednesdays the time the type of post and that is where you're going to find what is working and sometimes you have a great post but you posted it at the long time of day so don't worry when you're experimenting about reusing these posts and seeing okay would it make a difference they do it at this time and then paying attention to what the numbers are and then because you're only getting out getting a small percentage you're post out you can also go back here for finding okay can I reuse any of this content a month later or two months later because you're going to reach different people each time you post it so don't be worried about being fearful of doing that as well so do you have any other questions Jennifer wow there's been a lot going on I I just posted a link to the libraries and social media facebook group because I know that a lot of the questions that have come up today do show up and and are on that group for sure but there was just a quick question about hashtags on facebook do they work similarly to twitter and have you have you found success using hashtags on facebook I don't think it's really touched on facebook you can and I know some people have said it has worked well for them and some people said that it hasn't I guess it depends on how savvy your crowd is and if they know to click on the hashtag that it would help them a lot yeah I will say that a number there was an earlier post to chat about using each day of the week for sort of different types of content and I know a lot of libraries use hashtags for Tuesday's trivia trivia Tuesday or things like that and I know there are some sort of general hashtags that maybe you know that would show up in in general hashtag feeds that unless you have them specific to your library those are going to show up in the broader hashtag world on facebook but I do know some libraries are using really like one of the libraries in the social library that I posted today has a lego club and they have a specific hashtag to their libraries lego club so you know thinking about either making those hashtags specific to your library and using it as a way for your community then to quickly you know leverage the opportunity to have that feed from that hashtag show up so so that's one one way and there were as somebody said this is a huge amount of information and I'm now really glad that we've put a month at least a month between each of our webinars I really encourage people to take a look at the learner guide or any of the other tools as a way to sort of dive deeper between sessions pick a few a handful of steps that maybe we'll move you forward I we had a we actually had some activities in the session that we didn't have time for in terms of prioritizing I'm going to actually just jump ahead here yeah there was one activity at we had here of selecting some of these ways to use social media that many of the folks who responded in the survey would like to explore more so for instance levering hashtags so think about the things that maybe you could focus on between sessions as a way to take some baby steps some of you have some more advanced questions and I encourage you to tap into the group on Facebook as a way to connect and certainly make sure you're registered for the remaining two webinars and the the next session will focus actually on analytics and I know lots of questions that came up today relate to analytics and the ways to leverage analytics to both get your administration's buy-in to be able to demonstrate how you're spreading the word the different ways in which you're using Facebook as I said we continue to collect your input on the social media and library survey which we hope will be a valuable tool for you all to bring your story and your needs to your community so again that's another great way and I'll put the link to the page that will launch you to the survey in there as well and both sessions will be available as a part of this recording and also our sorry both presenters content will be available as part of the recording I will let you all know later today once that's all posted and also we'll send you all a certificate for joining today's session within a week so keep your eyes out for that and again any of our webinars are always recorded and made available to your fellow learners who maybe weren't able to join with us today and we look forward to seeing you next time on November 30th I'll also mention that as you leave today I'll send you to a short survey that survey will help us guide our ongoing series and programming and also provide feedback to our presenters and again thank you so much to our presenters Jessica and Amy for being here today and bringing all your great work to this series and a special thanks to Molly who will be joining us next time as a presenter and thank you again to TechSoup for joining us on this series and we look forward to seeing what you all bring to your social media presence and the great work your libraries are doing thank you all very much and thanks again to our captioner as well everyone have an excellent rest of your week