 Okay, first up on Big Talk from Small Libraries 2017 this year is social media in a small library with Monica Tiedemann who is actually here from in Nebraska, one of our Nebraska presenters today. So we're starting off with a local person. Monica is at our Stromsburg Public Library, population served of what I last saw, 1,172. Is that still pretty accurate? Yeah, that's pretty close. Yeah. Somewhere around there. And she's going to tell us how she's been able to pull off doing social media for their small library. So I'll just let you take it away, Monica. Okay, that sounds great. Thanks, Krista. Just want to welcome everyone here today. This is at least a fear in Nebraska. This is a great day to be inside doing a conference via our computers because otherwise we probably wouldn't have been able to go anywhere. It is definitely, I mentioned earlier is Snowy and Lincoln is pretty much the whole state has got something. I know out west there was at least six inches or so yesterday, so Western Nebraska. Yeah. Yeah, we only have an inch or two, but they did call school because we have a sheet of ice under the snow. So there is nothing happening in Stromsburg today, which is okay. Okay, so today I'm going to be just sharing our experiences in our library with social media. We'll talk a little bit about how we started using different social media platforms, what we've learned along the way, and hopefully you can learn some things from our mistakes and our adventures. We've had some great adventures too. My purpose today is just to show what we have done and just to hopefully empower other small libraries to make social media part of their library. If you're not already on social media, hopefully this will make you take that leap. I think it's a good outreach tool when used properly and anyone can use social media in some aspect with their libraries. I did not test out my slides, so we hope that these click over. There we go. All right. A little background on our library, as Krista said, we serve an area of about 1200 people. Our library has two staffs, myself as a three-quarter time employee and one other staff person, Duranda, who I'll mention throughout this presentation, and she works about 20 hours a week. We do serve our local town, but then also our local school district, and our school is located three miles south of town. Our district crosses county lines, which is why we're called Cross County, and so we do offer free library cards to anyone who has a child in our school. Okay. How to find us. Our library does have a webpage, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and a Twitter page. I'll show this slide again at the end if you want to make sure to write any of this down or anything. If you're thinking that's a lot for a small library to keep track of with two people, it is. We're going to talk about that today for sure. I feel we do a good job with maybe two out of the three of these platforms. We do really well with our Facebook page, which we're going to start with today, and I think we do a pretty good job of maintaining our website. Twitter and Instagram, we're slowly exploring and learning how to use better, and we'll talk about that when we get to those two. Okay. So, because we have used Facebook the longest, and I feel like we do a good job with that, I am going to start with talking about Facebook, so we're going to switch over to the webpage here so that you can see what we're doing with Facebook. Okay. This is our library homepage for Facebook. Facebook isn't always changing platform to meet the needs of its users. It's the joy of Facebook or not, depending on your perspective. So, some of the things I talk about today, maybe you've done it differently in the past, maybe you have seen it done differently, or you might notice new things even on the page today, and that's part of dealing with Facebook. If you're going to have a Facebook page, you have to be ready for things to change from day to day. You might log in and something will be totally different. There are various ways to complete a task on Facebook. I might show you one way, and you might know of another way. That is how Facebook does work. Even when Krista and I were preparing for this program, she showed me something that was right in front of my face the whole time that I had never even noticed. So, that's always a possibility with Facebook too. Our page was began in about 2010. At that time, I was pursuing my bachelor's degree in library science, so I was in school getting lots of information about technology, and I was working in the library for a staff person who was on medical leave doing just a temporary few months here. Because of those classes, I was really convinced of the fact that we needed a Facebook page at the library. I saw it as a great way to promote new materials, upcoming programs, informing the public about just things happening at the library, and really, this is how we end up still using it today. We still do all those things. I think it's been a good decision. It's been well received by those who do follow our page, and of course, we are still learning as we continue to use it. Quick note, if you're looking at this, thinking that does not look like the Facebook, I know, Facebook personal accounts are different than a Facebook page account, and if you are a business or an organization that is using Facebook, you're going to be on the pages, so it's going to look a little different, and we'll talk about that some more in a little bit when we talk about setting up an account. It can take a little getting used to, you're kind of like where's my stuff, but I think the differences are good. It kind of helps you keep track of whether you're on your personal page or your library page, and it also has a lot of things that help you, you know, you have the pages tips here, and then we'll also talk about insights and things that the Facebook pages gives you as an organization that I think are all valuable. A little bit about how we use Facebook in our library. We use our Facebook page primarily to announce events, which you will click on over here. We're moving a little faster earlier, but we'll get there. Okay, as you can see, we don't have any upcoming events. We're taking a little break. We've been kind of running around crazy lately here. One of our best events that we do post regularly on our Facebook page is our preschool story hour. It's just a little reminder to people that it's coming up. We only meet once a month, so it's a good reminder of, oh, that's this week or it's coming. Some of the moms use our Facebook event to say that they are going, and then it sends that reminder in your Facebook app that, hey, you have an event today, so they like that aspect of it. So we do use it for other events beyond preschool, just anything we have happening in the library. I can go back to those events here and show you just a few other things we did. We had a George Flippen Day. We use it for our book clubs, book sale, open house the friends had, and things like that just to let parents and kids know of what's coming up at the library. We also use Facebook a lot to post photos. The primary use of doing the photos is to let people know about new materials that we've got in. As you can see, we have an album here of new books for 2017. Dorinda, after she finishes covering the books, putting on the labels and things, will snap a quick picture and post that picture on Facebook. Sometimes she does a little description of the book. Sometimes it's just a quick synopsis here. And we have a love-hate relationship with our camera. As you can see here, it's a little blurry sometimes, and that drives us crazy, but like here, she says a little description about this book. And so we've been told by people that they enjoy that because they see what books are coming in, and they'll be like, I need to go to the library today to get that book. So that's been well-received. We've also had people who have shared that entire album on their page to promote what the library has, and we really appreciate that. And then just in general, we use it to just promote things about the library. Sometimes I share funny memes, or Dorinda did a picture on Valentine's Night when she was here talking about her love of nonfiction books and invited people to come visit the Lonely Librarian, because on Valentine's Night we didn't have a lot of people in here. So we just try to interact with our public using our Facebook page in whatever way we can. We don't have a huge following. We have about 220 likes. Would I like that to be bigger? Yeah, but I do feel like the people who like the library interact with us, and it's useful to them. And I feel like eventually, as that continues, people will want to connect with us and continue to find out about what's happening in the library, so I'm okay with where we're at. As I mentioned, one of our biggest groups of followers are stay-at-home moms in the area who keep up with when preschool storytime is another activities for their kids. We also have a large number of people who live out of town that just want to keep up with what is going on in their hometown, and then we have various other town residents who follow us. We learned all of this information here on Under Insights, which is one of the benefits of having a pages site instead of a personal account as you get all this information. You can tell there's a lot of things here. It shows your recent posts, shows engagement, which ones kind of went great, which ones maybe didn't go over so well. But what we use here probably the most, one of the most, is the people. And that's what I was talking about, of knowing your age group that you have who follow you, and also how many, you know, is it women or men? I think that makes a difference in what you tailor your posts to. As you can see, we don't have a lot of men following us. I would say that's probably typical of a rural area. The farmers, the ranchers, they may or may not use Facebook, but I don't know of a lot of farmers who really care about getting on their phones and using Facebook. As you can see, you know here, I think this is kind of funny, our 55 to 64 age group, there really is no interaction with them. But all of this is useful in deciding how to tailor your posts and what you're going to put on your page. The other thing that we probably use the most under insights is this segment right here called Post Engagements. Post Engagements lets you know when people are seeing your posts and what time of day and when they're interacting. Nine o'clock has been, at night has been a real common time period for the most interaction. It used to be the seven o'clock time period. People were getting up, maybe checking their Facebook before they left for work. Used to be a big time. It's kind of fallen off a little bit now. But the value to knowing when people are looking at your posts is so you can tailor your time that you post things to them. Now, I don't know about you guys, but nine o'clock at night, I really hope I'm not at work doing Facebook posts so that people can see what's happening at the library. So that's where another advantage of the Facebook pages comes in is the fact that you can schedule when you want your post to show up. So I'll go back to the page here, and I'll show you that. So when you're ready to post, you click here, ready to write something. It'll pop out. This is a newer feature where it pops out here, so you just see what you're posting. And instead of the typical post that you would have down here, you have an option to publish. And when you click on the dropdown menu here, one of those is to schedule. So I can write a post at 10 o'clock in the morning that I want people to see maybe about an upcoming event the next day when we did our fly sale for our book sale. We wanted people to know about it after we closed, but to also know that it was coming the next day. So we scheduled that post to happen at 9 o'clock that night. So you just pick the date and the time that you want a post to show up, and that's when Facebook will post it for you. So you don't have to be at your desk all the time to make sure that you are interacting with your patrons on Facebook. So I think this is a really nice feature of Facebook, and it works really well for us. We use this a lot, and I'll talk about that a little more in some of the other things that I talk about with Facebook. So close is that. A little information on setting up your page. When I set up our page, I had my personal account, and I made myself, I just created a page, which is an option on your home page. We'll maybe look at that too. But then you just make yourself administrator or whoever you want to be administrator. You can learn about what the different roles are and who you want to have most access to your page. You can decide that within your own organization. When, as I said, I was doing a medical leave for someone when I was working here and set up the page. So when I left, I made my replacement to admin of the page, and she took over working on the Facebook page. In a couple of years, when she moved on, it actually worked out for me to come back as a regular employee. And so she just transferred admin access back to me. The advantage to this of having your access being through the page here is that it's, everyone pretty much has their own Facebook page. And it's easy to set up who can be an administrator, who can edit, and who can post. We have given temporary access to our summer reading coordinators so they can create events and post for summer reading. And then at the end of the summer, when their employment with us is over, we just take them off the account and they don't have access to posting on our page as an admin anymore. Another advantage to this setup is that everyone has their own account, and they tap into the page from there. As you can see, if I go home to my personal account, this is my personal page. And then I can just click here to get back to the Stromsburg page with one click and do my library work and things that I need to do. So you don't have to worry about setting up passwords for Facebook and then changing them anytime your employment would change for people. Everyone has their own password, their own account, and then they can get over to your library account through there. A person that I visited with who's a librarian at a school, she really liked this setup because she's a big Facebook user, and she was on her account a lot. So she could just pop over to the work side and do what she needed to for her work account. So it's really easy to take care of that. And she liked that that she didn't have to log out of one account, log into another account to be able to do anything that she needed to for work. So I personally am not a huge fan of having my personal account set or connected to the library account. And I kind of wish I could unconnect it and still do work. So I want to explain why so that you're aware of all the ins and outs, as I said I would do. Because the library page is connected to my personal page, it does make connecting other social media to our library page a little tricky. Because I don't like to connect my personal account to other social media. I'm not one who's going to use Facebook to log into other apps and things. It's just a caution I was told about just making your account more secure so I don't do those things. Another issue for me is that I have to log into my personal account to get access to the library page. It's a little easy, I think, for me to get distracted by notifications, messages, new stories on your home page. Because when you first log into Facebook, this is what you're seeing. So I could see all the notifications and all the things happening. And it is easy to just get distracted by what's there instead of keeping focused on work and popping over to where I need to be. Maybe that's just me, but I'm sure it can be easy for everybody else. Another personal thing is I do not have Messenger installed on my phone. This used to create an issue for answering messages to our Facebook page. We have a couple of patrons who message us quite often of, hey, can you renew my book? And we wanted to let them know that, yes, we're seeing that. But if it was on my phone or I wasn't at work, maybe I wouldn't always see that until the next time I was at work. And we would just work out, like, fines or fees or whatever, because they did let us know. But maybe we didn't see the message. One last downside is that there have been times I've accidentally posted something personal to the library page because I was hurrying or not paying attention. This happens most often when I was using my phone to take pictures at the library or at library events. And I hadn't changed the share width setting at the top of the picture back to my personal account. So the next time that I took a picture for my personal account, if I didn't pay attention to who I was sharing that with, it showed up on the library page. Now this only happened a couple of times, but you're just like, oops. OK, so if you're thinking, yeah, I don't know if I want to do all that either. If I want my personal account connected to my library account or maybe I just want a dedicated library account, there is another way to set up your Facebook page. And I will have to log out here for a second to show you that. So when you're here, this is when you're creating the new account. If you have an account, you've done all these things. But then down here at the bottom, there is Create a Page for a Celebrity, Band, or Business. And you can just click on this. And then you will click on the Local Business or Place. And then you just put in your category. They have library as an actual category here for us, which is great. And then just basic information, business name, address, phone. When you click Get Started, I didn't want to set up like a profile and then abandon it because that can be a pain. So I didn't go any farther, but I think it's just normal information. They'll ask for however much information you want to put on your Facebook page. Maybe it is business hours. Maybe it's your mission statement, that type of thing. You'll put in that information. You'll get started on your page. So this would be set up using the library information, library email, library phone number, that type of thing. And it would not be connected to your personal account, as I understand it. And I hope that's correct. One thing I want to be clear on, a business or a group has to have a page instead of a personal account because Facebook can delete your account if you're using it to promote anything besides just yourself. So you do want to make sure you're creating a page for your library. As I said, I haven't found a way to unattach our personal accounts. I feel like I would have to, if I went this route, our Facebook page is really established already. And so I feel like we'd be abandoning a really well established page. And I don't want to do that either. I have found a solution that helps us, or at least it helps me. I'm not sure how much. Dorinda has been using it, but I use it a lot. There is an app for Facebook that helps you specifically manage pages that you are the admin of. I actually didn't know about this app until I started doing research for this presentation. But it's really handy, and I really like using it. The Pages app, as I'll click here so you can just kind of see what it looks like if you're looking for it in your App Store. It's called Facebook Pages Manager. It's a separate app from the Facebook app. So it would be another app on your phone or your device, your iPad, whatever. In the Pages app, you can publish posts, photos, videos, post a live video, or set up your events. Everything you need to manage your page is right here, your insights, messenger, notifications. Everything is in the app. So like I said before, one of my biggest issues before I started using the Pages app was when I would take pictures with my phone for the library and try to post to the library page from the Facebook app. This has gotten a little better, but it used to not be so easy. And as I said, you would have to change those share settings back. So the Pages app helps eliminate this. If you take pictures that you want to post to the library page with a device, you open the Pages app and do the posting right from there without having to go through your personal account at all. I think it's a real time saver, and there's no embarrassing personal posts on your library page. You can also access the Pages app from your personal timeline if you are using a personal computer. And I will have to go back into Facebook to make that happen here. So when you're on your personal page, down here is the Pages. You can click here. Or as Krista showed me when we were setting things up, you can click here. Your shortcuts will be available also here. But when you click Pages, it takes you to any pages you liked, and then you can do your pages, which would be Stromsburg Public Library for us. Or as you saw, that's also the option of doing the Create a Page to get a page started through your account. OK, so I think that is really great. We recently did a book giveaway called The 12 Days of Giving during Christmas. And we gave away a book a day for 12 days, and we posted which book we were giving away each morning. So I used the Pages app to take a picture of each book. I wrote a post for that day, and then I scheduled it to post in the correct order. So it was super easy to do that. And you can use the Pages app, whether you have your library account attached to your personal account or not, so that's really handy. One other thing before we finish up here with Facebook is I wanted to show you on your personal page, you have your timeline where you follow your friends and your family. And you can do that in your library page, too. And you can follow separate things that are maybe just library related, which is what I do. And that is called the Pages feed. And I think this is a nice benefit of Facebook, too. You can keep up to date with authors. You can keep up to date with library related pages, whether it's One Book, One Nebraska, Internet Public Library, other libraries you can follow here from the Pages feed. And then it's just another way of keeping work and your personal life separate. So when I'm on my personal Facebook account, I am just seeing things from my friends and family. And probably about once a week, I pop over here into the library world and do just some library reading. These are Goodwill Library, and it's a great way to get some fun memes or things to post on the library page if you want something a little lighter to put up there. And the way that you find pages you want to do is you just come up here to the Pages feed and like other pages. Maybe you know an author that you want to know when they have a new book coming out. This is a great place to follow authors' official pages, make sure it's their official page. And you will get information about authors and upcoming books and things. And I think that's just handy, so. Before we finish up here, I guess I didn't ask Krista about this. But are there any questions or suggestions or ideas? Yeah, actually that's what I was going to say, Monica. I was going to say before you jump off of showing Facebook, we did have some comments and questions. One thing I do want to say, you were talking about scheduling your unoutnote announcements and notices. And I should tell you, that's actually what I did for today's conference as well to today's event. We have a big talk from a small library's Facebook page, as well as I went for the Nebraska Library Commission. I've got posts automatically scheduled to go out during the day today, so that I didn't have to think about doing it while I was running the event. So you'll see announcements and reminders of what the next sessions are coming up. And I said that all up yesterday. So if you have something going on, like this kind of an ongoing thing during the day, a conference or something, you can have those things preset to go to just keep nudging people about coming on to the event that you're hosting. So I just want to show us again how you got to the pages feed. Oh, OK. You scroll down here on the right-hand side. It's kind of hidden. They changed this maybe about, I don't know, six months ago, maybe not even that long ago. There's a lot of things that change regularly. You have to find again where things are, yeah. I actually had to go into Facebook Help to see where my pages went to. It just was gone. So it is kind of hidden, as you could see there. But it is kind of buried down here on the right-hand side. Cool. Someone did want to know, have you ever boosted a post? And what kind of results did you get from that there? I know that Facebook, they promote that to us as well. Yeah, I have not actually done that. I guess I just was like, eh, the money. And but I will say, this is an advantage of the Arsile listserv, because I am in the middle of Arsile and see those things. Somebody was just talking about that on the Arsile listserv. And some people did mention that, yeah, to them, it's worth the $5 to boost a post about an event or something that's upcoming. And they did feel like they got really good response off of that. For those one-time things, we're doing something special, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Have you done any live Facebook video to promote books or events? Any Facebook live? That's a new thing that everybody can use? Yes, I did. There's one video here. This is a live video that I did. And I actually was talking to a patron yesterday, and they're like, you need to do more of those. Those were fun. So it's something I need to remember. What I did with this live video was we'd got a big box of pre-orders from Baker and Taylor. So I did a whole open the box, and let's see what it's in the box thing. And I had actually looked through the box, so I knew what was in there. But then I did like a little book talk about each book that was in the box. And it wasn't a huge box. It was probably six or seven books. But it was kind of fun to just give people ideas of what the new books were that were going to be on the shelf, build the anticipation, that type of thing. Cool. And did you get any, did people comment? Or I can see there, it looks like there's some like sign. Did they just headline comment? Yeah. I should do more live. I think people start looking forward and see that you're going to be doing those kind of things, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so like I said, they said, you need to do that more often. So it's something I just need to have on my conscious and plan out. Yeah, yeah, as someone says, how do you do it? Facebook Live is something when you've got something with a video camera that you can use. And it's an option when you've got an inter-Facebook app to just do live video. You may have seen lots of celebrities or business organizations do it. But anybody can do one now. Yeah. I have not had the nerve to do it, but I think the hardest part for me was just setting up where to do the video so that you were looking at the right thing and all that. Yeah, you might want to practice ahead of time with how your camera view is. And yeah. Especially small libraries, because we're usually here by ourselves. Right, yeah. I'll just do this one last thing. We do have lots of questions coming in. Everyone should want to let you know. We've got a lot of people online right now. So we won't be able to get everybody's questions in. But you can if you want to afterwards. Manneke will have her in contact and you can reach out to her with any other questions I don't get to. Some justices have suggested another place you can join. A group to join called The Shareable Click, CLI, QUE, Facebook Library Group dedicated to sharing Facebook ideas. Oh, cool. So The Shareable Click. Everybody take a look at that. Yeah, and there's so many groups on Facebook that are great for following and knowing more information about how to do this. Yeah, just search for libraries and you'll find lots. All right, go ahead and let's move along so I make sure you get through everything. OK, well, the rest of them aren't as long, so that helps. OK, so we were talking about posting pictures and things. So that just kind of for me leads us into Instagram here. I started our Instagram account as a way to reach the tweens and the teens age group of our community. Last summer, we had some great volunteer helpers for our summer reading program. One of them was a freshman in high school and one was a seventh grader. In talking with them, I discovered that out of all the social media, Instagram is their preferred app for that age group. They don't really consider Snapchat social media to them. That's just texting. I felt like if we wanted to reach those teens and tweens, which we do have a hard time getting into our library, that we needed to be on Instagram to post more things that would maybe attract them. According to those Facebook insights that I talked about, the 13 to 17-year-old age range only makes up 1% of our followers. So we're not reaching them the way that we need to be. So unfortunately, I kind of tackled Instagram without a lot of thought. I didn't even have my own personal Instagram account before I set up the library Instagram account. That was just one bandwagon somewhere along the way that I missed. Thinking it was like Facebook, I created a personal account and then tried to create a page from that account. Instagram does not work that way. Although it's owned by Facebook, it does not work the same way. You can create a business account using the library email and just call it good. One note that I want to say about using library email and creating accounts under the library, you're often asked for a birth date. Use a date that you can remember, or for us, I use the date that our new building was dedicated because then that makes us 16 years old and we're able to use social media. So you kind of have to consider that what date you're using. You need to be over 13 years old to be on most of these apps. Yeah, I think here at the library commission, we've set up lots of different social meetings and we've used the creation date of the commission, which makes us like 100-something years old. Right, it works. It works, you know, after over 13. Yes. Okay, so because I didn't have the personal account, I really didn't use Instagram a lot and I didn't know a lot about it and I don't still use Instagram personally. So I just leave the Instagram app logged in on my phone and take pictures with my phone as that's the way that you can post onto Instagram. We signed up for Instagram just this past summer. We've only made, let's see, we have 28 posts now. That was better than when we started a few weeks ago even. I feel like both Dorenda and I don't have a real great grasp of Instagram before we started, so we're still kind of struggling on how we wanna use this and what we wanna do. But if you're not familiar with Instagram, as some people may not be out there, this is what little bit I do know about Instagram. My take on it is it's like Facebook if you are a Facebook user that posts lots of pictures and don't just post comments and things a lot. The appeal of Instagram is the ability to edit the pictures you take. You can snap a picture in the app or use one from the library on your phone or your device and then you can use a variety of filters to create a look as well as editing tools to create just the perfect picture that you wanna post. When the picture is just the way you like it, you can then caption your photo. I've decided there is no word limit to the captions as sometimes I've seen people post entire book reviews under a photo. Instagram is definitely all about the picture. If you are wanting to advertise upcoming events or create interest in the library through Instagram, you will have to use a picture format like JPEG or PNG. So you'd have to use a program like Canva to create a document that you can save as a picture that you can put on Instagram. The key to getting noticed on Instagram is hashtags. And I wanted to talk just a little bit about hashtags as they are important to both Instagram and Twitter. According to Evan LePage, a hashtag is likely the most popular means of categorizing content on social media. It makes your own content discoverable and it allows you to find relevant content from other people and businesses. The hashtag also allows you to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common theme or interest. So I've been doing a lot of reading on Hootsuite's blog and according to them, a hashtag and an awesome caption are essential to getting noticed on Instagram. And I would say they are right. They do know what they're talking about. I highly recommend reading Evan LePage's article The Do's and Don'ts of How to Use Hashtags and that can be found on the Hootsuite blog for information on the best way to make use of them. When I followed his advice, I felt like we definitely had more likes on our photos. If we go down here to one of our early ones, you can see that we just have two likes. This was about our hot chocolate and cookies day we were doing over the holidays and watching a movie. And this is actually my son and my niece were the only two likes of this one. But I'd only done my hot chocolate cookies holidays for hashtags. I didn't use any trending hashtags, I guess would be the best word. This picture, I tried to be a little more aware of the hashtags I was using. And when you go to post on Instagram, you can start typing like hashtag library. And underneath of that, it will pop up with all these suggestions of hashtags and it will show how many uses that hashtag has had. If you can find a well-used hashtag that fits your picture, use it. Because there are people who just follow those hashtags. So if somebody uses hashtag genealogy and if you don't know what a hashtag is, I should say that too. A hashtag is this little pound symbol here. If you're old enough like me, you used to call it the pound symbol or the number sign. But using hashtag genealogy gathered a lot of information from people. So there's always that benefit too to make sure you have to learn how to use the hashtags, I think, to use Instagram to the best of your abilities. And another thing that I laughed about when I was doing this presentation and talking about why we started Instagram is the fact that we started it for tweens and teens. And how many of these pictures do you see that would appeal to a teen or a tween? So actually, I think we've got off mission here and maybe if we get back to what our mission and our focus was for Instagram, that might help us get a few more followers on Instagram. So my advice with Instagram is do your research. Spend some time really looking at Instagram and what others are posting. Is it something that you can see yourself using? Is it something that you're familiar with at all? Do you want to do it? Maybe you're just like, I don't see the point to doing just pictures. Then this might not be for you. So you have to kind of look at these different platforms. As I said, Facebook is the most used, but Darinda and I were also the most familiar with Facebook before we started. So you have to kind of know what you are doing with Instagram. Instagram, you see some of these are kind of artsy looking, some of them are just a regular snapshot like this picture. It depends on what your patrons are looking for and what you're comfortable posting. Some people use the filters a lot. Some people never put a filter on their photo. One of the coolest things that I was reminded of this past week is the fact that we're often told as libraries to get out of our library, do more community things. Don't think about how you can bring people into the library. What can the library do for the community? One of the most popular pictures that we've had on Instagram and then I also connected this to Facebook so it popped up on Facebook. The most interaction I've had on a picture I put on Instagram was this picture that was a view of our uptown as I was walking uptown just last week in 70 degree weather to get the mail. So Instagram can be a good outreach. Maybe look for things around town that you could take pictures of and just get people to interact with your page on. So that's about the extent of my knowledge on Instagram. Do we have thoughts, questions on that? Sorry, actually just a couple of, do you have someone assigned like an admin or an editor similar to what is in Facebook or it doesn't exactly work the same way as you discovered in the menu first talking about this? Yeah, it didn't work the same way. So what we did was we just have our login, our username here, the Stromsburg Public Library and a password and Dorinda and I both do use that. And I guess I am not familiar enough with Instagram. I haven't dug into that to see about that. Yeah, me either, I feel, yeah. I haven't jumped down to it myself either so I'm not, I couldn't say as well. But I do know that, yeah, each library or something it's not the same thing as Facebook or you've got your personal and it's linked to something. Another one, each profile is a separate and independent thing, yeah. Yes, it is, yep, yep. And Instagram, as you can see here, it's a little tough. Like this is what you have to click on to find your personal account. This is kind of your notification section and then this is your settings. That took me a while to go, where is everything? And then of course, you know, the little ellipses or it's more, so. That is something, the ellipses is something very common across social media. Look for something with three dots it'll get you more stuff that you can do. Yeah, three dots or three lines. It's always something, it means more. Yes. That is at least one standard. All right, go ahead. I don't wanna make sure we get everything in before we have to be ahead. I'll keep moving here. All right, so we'll move on real quick to Twitter and I did have some stuff built in that if we needed to skip it we could. So we should do fine here. After listening to Shannon McClintock Miller present a keynote at our Nebraska Library Association's fall conference last, just this fall, I came home fired up about Twitter account. Shannon is a person who really uses Twitter a lot. She talked about it a lot in her keynote and she uses it to interact with authors, other educators. She's found authors willing to Skype with her students just by asking on her Twitter account what author wants to Skype with my students. She also has contacted authors through Twitter. You can do personal messaging on Twitter like you can do on Facebook. And it was really an amazing talk that opened my eyes to the world of Twitter. But again though, I have to say with Twitter how much time do you have. And one thing I thought of too is I really should have asked Shannon if she uses other social media accounts besides Twitter because maybe Twitter is just her main use and that's something else to consider also. You know, you need to think about which app would your patrons be using more? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Who are you trying to reach with that? Twitter takes a real dedication to posting to it and I would say that most small libraries don't have a lot of time for that or a thought process. You know, of thinking of being on Twitter a lot and I'm not sure that you can schedule posts on Twitter not that I have found so far. Actually, you can. Oh, okay, good. But you have to use TweetDeck. TweetDeck is kind of like a service that you can use to run your Twitter and if you have multiple Twitter accounts like we have here at the library commission. It used to be a separate product that was created and a member who came up with it but then Twitter bought them. So you go to Twitter.com like you have here or there's Twitter apps for different devices but TweetDeck.com is where you can go to and then, and that's actually I was gonna say, just like on Facebook I did for today's conference I've pre-scheduled tweets to go out about each session as it's coming up. So if you use that interface to do your Twitter then yes, you can pre-schedule things just like in Facebook. Awesome, that's good. Yeah, and that might help with what you were saying. I just think that as you said some people don't have a lot of time to spend on this. That might help a lot of small libraries I think who are trying to figure out how can I think to every day go in and put something up for every few hours. Spend an hour, one day a week pre-scheduling things. Yes. Rather than trying to think every day I have to think of something, you know or just sit down and do it that way and then you can have a lot more interaction. Yeah, and the reason that Twitter is so time-intensive and Christy you might have some knowledge on this too but there are so many tweets in an hour that you are quickly moved to the bottom of the page. And depending on what people are following like you said you can follow hashtags and certain accounts of course, but yeah if you're just looking at everything that's out there. Yeah, if you're just trying to scroll through your homepage on Twitter you're never gonna see everything and those summer reader helpers had let us know that and one thing I wanted to mention was on Pinterest I found an infographic from Constant Contact Inc. And they talk about how much should you post on different social media sites and on Twitter they call Twitter a high volume, low value network according to them you need to post a minimum of five times a day on Twitter to be noted. But the content of the tweets doesn't matter as much as like say a Facebook post. They look at Facebook as being a low volume you don't wanna annoy your followers on Facebook but what you post should be of high interest to those that you're posting to. So that really kinda opened my eyes to Twitter and I'm not real sure that I do a real great job with Twitter I do a lot of retweeting on Twitter and the other advantage of and we're running out of time so I'll just say when we post on our webpage that our webpage posts are also connected to Twitter and to Facebook so that this was a post that I did on our webpage and then it popped up on our Twitter feed. So that helps with our presence on online media and that is if you're with the Nebraska Library Commission hosting your webpage they actually there's an add-on called Jetpack that you wanna turn on and you wanna turn on access to your Facebook and your Twitter accounts for the library. It's one less thing you have to think about I guess is what I wanna say with that. It is very useful you make one post and then it goes out to multiple locations. Yeah, yeah. So if you're using WordPress to host like a blog or a page that's where we have that access to. So just a couple of wrap up things because I think we are kind of running out of time, right? Krista? Yeah, you just have a minute or two. We did start yours a couple of minutes after, after nine so we do have a little bit of a wrap. Just a couple of questions for you after you do your final whatever you wanna wrap up with. Yeah. So a couple of just recommendations if you're considering social media if you haven't started it for your library start small. If you're more familiar with one media platform or another start with what you know even just getting your library on one social media platform is obviously more than you're doing now if you're not doing any of it. Get help. This could be in the form of other people or technology. Krista and I have mentioned some of the things like TweetDeck another app that I would recommend looking at just cause I'm familiar with it is Hootsuite. Same concept as TweetDeck I guess you can connect to your social media for Twitter and for Facebook is my understanding. Yes as far as I know. It's something to actually ask about that so it's good that you mentioned it. Okay yeah so Hootsuite is one thing you can use and you can connect all three of your accounts to Hootsuite and then you can schedule your posts through there and have them you can do all the scheduling and things that we've talked about right through Hootsuite and that'll go to all three social media platforms Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And it looks like maybe LinkedIn also. Yeah it looks like it has more things I've been adding over time yeah. Instagram is listed on there as well yeah. Yeah and so one thing because of the whole personal account being connected this is I think there's like a little workaround you have to do with Hootsuite. So I just try to do posts on Instagram and then when I post that to Instagram and let me click over to my PowerPoint real quick cause this is on the app so it's kind of hard to see. I kind of abandon the PowerPoint cause it was too much clicking back and forth was my decision. No that's great to actually see these things live. When you post on Instagram you wanna make sure and turn on these buttons down below that that post will also show up on Facebook and Twitter. So that's one way that you can cover all three social media platforms without adding yet another app to your device is just start on Instagram and then you can post to Facebook and Twitter from there also and when you're on Twitter you can actually connect your Facebook account to Twitter also and you can post to both of those at the same time. So that can be kind of our wrap up and we can answer some questions if we need to and Twitter was kind of short and sweet but if you have more questions about Twitter I really recommend Twitter's help section. They have one of the best help sections that gives great explanations of everything about Twitter in very understandable language. It's not too techy. So I really recommend the Twitter help section. I used it a lot when I do social media classes here in the library for the public. We go to the Twitter help section and read off their definitions and explanations a lot. Okay, all right, thank you Monica. We do have a couple of questions that I didn't wanna grab as I said before. We have a lot of questions coming in. We won't be able to get all of your questions asked but do feel free to reach out to our presenters afterwards if you do have any more or you wanna know about what they've been speaking about. When a good recommendation, if you are starting a social media account make sure to check to see if your city or county or whoever's in charge of you has a social media policy that you are required to follow. Don't just go out there on your own and create one without knowing that first. So see if there's something that's being dictated in some way to you as how you are supposed to do these things. Check and see if you've got something for your city or county and see if they have someone in charge that could also maybe also help you get your stuff set up but just make sure you're following along with any policies they might have. And I have a question about comments. This is something I think it'd be very important to worry about. Do you active and all of these different services people can make comments, yes. Do you actively monitor responses and respond and how do you handle inappropriate comments? I would say we've been very lucky to not have any inappropriate comments. I haven't had to deal with that yet and again, I would say this would be where we need to maybe have more of a social media plan and thought that we actually had some policies on comments and what to do with those. Those are two, share your own policy as well. If your city or county doesn't have one, yeah, that we need to have our own policies on that. So I haven't had that experience yet and we do try to respond to all comments whether it's just liking a comment that somebody makes on our Facebook posts or if we actually respond if they're asking a question or something like that. Yeah, social media is not just a one way it's a conversation as you may have heard in many presentations and things before so you do need to not just be putting things out there but saying something back to people when they say something to you via any of these. You have to remember when you're on social media which page you're on and who you're representing. You're representing the library and you wanna be professional. You can be fun and be professional. Absolutely. All right. All right, thank you very much, Monica. I am going to, so that will wrap it up for Monica's session. Okay. Our first session of the day. Good job. Thank you. All right.