 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, 15 Ways to Improve Your Libraries Facebook Page. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. In just a minute we'll be joined by our guest, Jamie Masek, who has 15 tips to share that will improve your library's Facebook page. But before we begin, I have a few announcements to share. Today we'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We'll be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we'll forward them back out to the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. 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Our mission statement is that we are working toward a time when every social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, resources, and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. TechSoup was founded in 1987 and has consistently upheld a mission of social sector capacity building. TechSoup creates new ways to access technology, new paths to connect and network, and new means to learn and develop skills so that all nonprofits and libraries can operate at their full potential and more effectively deliver their programs and services and to better achieve their mission. Our work and their impact are worldwide. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date. I know that in today's webinar we have people joining from libraries and nonprofits around the world, so welcome to all of you. TechSoup offers a wide range of software, hardware, and services through their product donation program. This includes discounted subscriptions to software, refurbished computers, and technology services. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. We have two TechSoup product donations which might be helpful as you work on your library's Facebook page. Adobe Creative Cloud can help you edit images with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. And another tool that might interest you is Tint, which is a platform that you can use to display your social media networks like Pinterest on a display screen on your organization's website. If you are interested in either of these tools, they are both available through the TechSoup product donation program, so visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services for more details. Our guest today is Jamie Masek, joining us from the Nicolet Federated Library System in Wisconsin. Jamie coordinates continuing education for library staff throughout her region. She also coordinates public relations for NFLS and has a lot of experience managing social media, and in particular Facebook. Today she will share some knowledge with us, some of her knowledge with us. And my name is Crystal Schimpf and I will be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Jenny Meese and Susan Bard from the TechSoup team. We will be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs handle. Today Jamie will be sharing 15 ways that you can improve your library's Facebook page. She will pull from business and other industries to cite best practices for Facebook engagement. The messaging may be targeted towards public libraries, but the principles are general and can also be applied to other types of libraries and to nonprofit organizations. At the end, Jamie will share a few resources that might help you explore this topic further. We'll have time for questions throughout the webinar and please send us your questions in chat as they arise. And we'll address as many questions as we're able to at the end. If you happen to ask a question that we're not able to answer during the webinar, we will follow up later via email with a response. Now this webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive of this webinar which you should receive by the end of this week. Okay, now we're ready to turn things over. Jamie, I'll let you take it from here. Okay, thank you so much, Crystal. And I want to thank all of you for listening in today and I want to thank Tech Super Libraries for having me present. As Crystal mentioned, I'm speaking live from the gloomy Green Bay, Wisconsin. We don't have any snow here yet. I don't know about the rest of you out in the country. We've had a lot of rain lately and we're on track to have an unseasonably rainy and warm December, which I'm not too happy about if I do like snow. So as Crystal mentioned, I'm going to talk about Facebook and how we can improve our page. And right off the bat, I'm going to ask you to complete this poll. What do you want to accomplish with your library Facebook page? Think about that. And you can type your response in the chat box. And I can watch that. Jamie, I'm just going to come on the line here. It looks like we're having a little issue with the chat, but why don't we come back to this poll later on and I'll let you keep on going with things right now as we resolve the chat issue on our backend and we'll hopefully get those chat messages resolved soon. Okay, sounds good. We've started fan pages for organizations and businesses back in 2007. And I think at that time a lot of libraries hopefully started a page. I know a lot of us weren't really sure if we'd find it unofficial. And I'm guessing a lot of libraries now have Facebook pages and I think that's great. I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. I do see it changing. I do see Facebook being a platform to advertise. I do see things changing with Facebook, but I don't see it going anywhere. So I do think it's still important and still relevant for libraries to have a page. It should do all of these things that are listed. And if we do do it well, it should in essence drive traffic to our website and hopefully other events at our library and then of course bring patrons into our library. Let's look at some stats. So this is from 2008 to middle of 2015. And as you can see it just keeps going up. The number on the left side of your screen is a million. So if you look at 2012, Facebook users surpassed 1 billion active users. Then to 1.28 billion in 2014. And as of mid 2015, we're up to 1.49 active users. So simply put, Facebook is where people are at. I know when I want to reach somebody pretty quickly, whether it's for personal or professional reasons, I go to Facebook and I generally get a quicker answer than if I use email or call somebody. So we know it's where people are spending time. How much time are they spending? Well this is from August of 2015. This was a recent analysis done. And you can see that the average user is spending almost an hour a day on Facebook. And a lot of those hours are on our smartphones. So as I said, it's where people are. It's where people are. It's where they're spending their time. So we know people are spending time here. But are they seeing your library's Facebook page? Well, not necessarily. We know that Facebook uses edge rank, which is an algorithm that determines what posts people see and where they show up in our feed. We can't possibly see everything on Facebook. If you have 300, 400, 500 friends and you follow 50 pages, you can't see everything. It's just impossible. So that's why Facebook uses edge rank to determine what we see. So what is edge rank based on? Based on three things. One of them is affinity or relationship. So let's say you have two friends, friend A and friend B. Let's say with friend A between the two of you, you have 50 mutual friends. You comment and like a lot of stuff on that friend's page. She does the same with you. As opposed to friend B, let's say between the two of you, you only have one mutual friend. You don't comment on a whole lot of her stuff. Maybe your relationship isn't as strong with her even on Facebook. So of course, you're going to have a higher affinity with friend A. You have a higher relationship with that person. So affinity is one thing. And then there's time decay. Simply put, the older a post is, the less apt someone is going to see it in their feed. And then there's weight. The more people who like, who comment, who share things that we post on our library page, those posts are going to have a better weight. They're going to have a higher ranking. They're going to show up more in people's feeds. So organically, on average, what percentage of posts are our fans seeing? It's only 16%. That's not a lot. I think that shocks a lot of us when we see it. So we need to make sure we are doing Facebook well. We need to make sure it's not an afterthought and it's a good investment of our time. Some people do feel the only way to grow our Facebook page audience is through F. And I think there is something to be said for that, but I still do believe we can organically grow our page if it's done well. And when I say organically, I mean by not paying to use Facebook, by not boosting posts, by not purchasing ads, by not paying for reach. We also don't want to turn our fans away if we're doing things poorly. So 16% is something. And I still do think we can improve this. So what do we want to accomplish with your library Facebook page? If you could select one of those. And I'm just curious to see where you are looking to improve your page in Facebook. I'll just give you a few more seconds to do that. Okay, I'm seeing a lot of promote library services and programs. And that's great. I think Facebook was a great tool for that and attracting new library users. Great. I think the thing that I'm going to talk about today can help us improve some of those things. So thank you very much for doing that. And that basically leads us to 15 ways we can improve our library Facebook page. And we're going to start now with those 15. Number one, we're going to start with the basics, basic maintenance. The worst thing that you can do on any social media page is to let it sit. It's to have inactivity. If you haven't updated your library Facebook page since 2013 and you don't have the resources for someone to keep it up to date, get rid of it. And I'm dead serious about that. It is not doing any good sitting out there. And this is not just true for Facebook, but any social media site your library has a presence on. You have a blog that hasn't been updated in two years, a Pinterest page, a Twitter account, a Tumblr page, a YouTube account. Now would be a good time to do some of that social media inventory and see what's out there that your library has, something that maybe somebody started and it's not being continued. Again, it just doesn't make our library look good when stuff is incomplete. We need to have our basic information on our Facebook page, address, phone, website. This is a little off the subject, but the same thing goes for our library website. If your hours and your address and your phone number is not easily found on the homepage of your library's website, make sure it's on there. I guarantee that those are the types of things people are wanting to find when they go to your library's page. So we need to make sure we're doing the basic things really well. Facebook also rolled out a few months ago a call to action button and this is right on our cover area and it prompts your fans to do something. So for our page right now, I have a contact us, but you can choose things like send a message, call us, etc. So if you haven't utilized that, make sure you do. Another thing we should be doing, this is very basic, is we should be commenting and liking other fan pages because every time your library does that, it is seen by their fans and could draw potential traffic to your page. Who should our fans be? I don't necessarily think it should be other libraries and I see a lot of libraries doing that. Rather, they should be other community organizations. So take a look at your library's page as a fan of and do some inventory with that as well. Number two, customer response. I'm going to talk a little bit about Roller Jam and a lot of you have probably not heard of them. That is because they're in Ireland and I don't know, maybe we have a few people on from Ireland today, I'm not sure. But I was at a conference two years ago in Limerick and I read about this place and it sounded really awesome. They basically have lessons and open skating. They have over 10,000 fans on their Facebook page and as I mentioned, they are based in Limerick. So I didn't have a lot of luck finding information on their website. So I went to their Facebook page and I posed a question. I was interested in finding out the cost to get in, if they rent skates and do they sell wine or beer? Because apparently that was very important to me at the time. So this is a snapshot of the conversation I posted. And you don't have to read all the detail, but I just want to point out that this person at Roller Jam responded to every single question I had, which really impressed me. That person easily could have blown me off because I don't live in Ireland. I don't live anywhere near Ireland. She didn't even know if I was going to attend. And if I did attend, who knows the next time I'm going to get back? She could have totally blown me off, but she didn't. She answered every single question of mine. I recently read a stat that 70% of questions on social media go unanswered. 70%. That would be like 7 out of 10 people walking up to your search desk or your reference desk or whatever you call it and being ignored. And we can't imagine that. That's really hard to imagine. So we don't want to ignore the people that are online as well. We want to make sure these questions and comments are being answered. My rule of thumb is 24 hours. That's for anything. That's for email, that's for phone, that's for Facebook, anything. If it's a question you don't know, you say you're looking into it and you get back to that person. Number three, posting. But how often, how much and what time? How often? I think we feel a lot of times that the more we post, the more apps people or fans are going to see are stuffed. And that really isn't that true. The maximum we really want to post on Facebook is 1 to 2 times a day. So about 5 to 10 times a week. And since a lot of libraries are closed on Sunday, I would focus this during the weekdays. I wouldn't worry as much about it on weekends. And studies are showing that anything more than twice a day is just ignored. For Pinterest, it's about 5. For Twitter, about 3, but Facebook is 2. So we don't want to oversaturate posts. How much should we be writing? And I'm sure we've all heard this short and sweet. Nothing more than 250 characters. We want to keep it as short as possible. We don't want to write a book. Otherwise, we're going to lose people. And then what time? I think back in the day, the golden rule was morning before people went to work, the noon hour when people were at lunch, and then at night when people were on Facebook. But in 2013, Facebook introduced Facebook Insights for fan pages which give us some great data on fan demographics, where they're from, and what time they're online. So this is a snapshot of my Insights from my Traveling Baker fan page. It's a page that I developed where I talk about traveling and baking, two of my hobbies. And under posts, under my Insights, it shows me when my fans are online. And for me, it's mostly 8 a.m. That's my peak time. So that is when I tend to post. In Insights under the tab, People, this shows more demographics. So as you can see, most of my fans are women ranging from the ages of 18 to 24. It also shows what country they're from, the city, and what languages they speak. So I tend to post a lot of recipes from Morocco. I visited Morocco in 2009. So I do have quite a few fans from Morocco, which is pretty interesting. So utilize these Insights if you haven't. Point 4 through 8, I'm going to talk about exceptional engagement. How do we improve correspondence with our patrons by the way we engage? So I'm going to give some examples of how other businesses engage really well on Facebook. One way that we can engage well is by utilizing humor. And Old Spice, they have a Facebook page with over 2.6 million fans. We know of them as a deodorant and body wash company. We tend to think of Old Spice as kind of our dads or our grandpas deodorant. But they made a comeback a few years ago with the Old Spice guy. He was in some funny ads and in some funny commercials. And I think that was to get some younger demographics. What they do really well is they appeal to humor. So here's a post from September 21st. Go ahead and read that. So their posts are funny. If you look at this, it has nothing to do with Old Spice. It has nothing to do with pushing their products on people. So look at their shares and look at the amount of people who like this. If you look at their page, several of their posts have memes or photos that have very little to do with their products. And that's actually something really good. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute. And these kinds of posts show that people behind the Old Spice product have a sense of humor. So how can we apply this to what we do in libraries? I would encourage you to take a look at what you're posting. Not everything. In fact, not everything should have to directly relate to the library. It shouldn't. For a lot of people, Facebook and social media, but I think for Facebook it's a form of entertainment. There is nothing wrong with being entertaining. So take a look at what's happening in your community. Are there funny things happening? Share those things. Share those events or share those things that are humorous. Number five, another way we can engage is through contacts. Milwaukee Brewers is our professional baseball team here in Wisconsin based in Milwaukee. They do a lot of player and fan features. They're also really big on Instagram. They acknowledge any player or coach who has a birthday also on social media. So they're pretty active in it. One thing that they do is a contest leading up to opening day. And for you baseball fans out there, you know that opening day in professional baseball starts usually at the end of March or early April. So they start with day 100, working back. They encourage fans to submit photos depicting that day leading up to opening day. And I will give you an example because I know it's hard to explain. So this was posted last January. It's a mug of coffee with an 82 written. And the caption says, the best part of waking up is knowing you're one day closer to opening day. Every photo uses the hashtag, CuApril6. So the person who submitted that photo was entered into a drawing to win a 10 pack of tickets on opening day. And of course they feature these on their Facebook page, which I think is pretty cool. Here's another one. We love our bratwurst in Wisconsin. And here was the caption. Opening day is so close, you can almost taste it 27 days and counting. So 1600 likes, which is really, really impressive. So this is wildly popular on their page, this contest. Amtrak also runs a contest. Amtrak, as we know, Travel Train service, almost 500,000 fans. They have some really beautiful photos on their Facebook page that they receive from travelers on Amtrak. They do things a little bit differently than the brewers do. What they do is what's called a photo of the week or Amtrak POTW. And they encourage their writers to submit a photo every week. They post it and then they allow their fans to vote on their favorite photo. So in this instance, actually the favorite photo was number one, the one at the top. They had 41 shares. You can't see how many people voted, but they had over 300 people vote. And then the winner of the photo who had the most votes, they get featured then on their page. Pretty great. So I do think contest and competition is a great way to build engagement. It's a great way to gain new fans because you know who's ever kid this is in the bottom corner. We're going to tell everybody to go to Amtrak's page and vote for number three. How do we apply this to the library? So maybe you don't want to use 100 days, but do you have a big event like summer reading or a fundraiser, something that everybody in your community looks forward to? Have a countdown. Have a countdown for 10 days. It is so easy now for people to take photos and upload them up to Facebook or up to websites. Do you have contacts at your library? What about sandwich making contacts? What if in your children's area you gave each kid 30 Legos and said build something, and you take pictures of those structures and then post them on your Facebook page and let people vote? And you want to make people solely vote on Facebook because again, little Timmy's mom doesn't like your library's Facebook page already and little Timmy submits a Lego structure. You don't well know. She will become a Facebook fan of yours when that happens. I want to mention a caveat with contest. So to collect entries, you can ask people to like or comment on a post on your page. So for example, you can say like this post to enter. You can also ask your fans to send a message to your page. What you can't do is ask people to share a post on their personal pages to enter your promotion. That is not permitted. So Mary can go ahead and post to her page about the contest and tell her friends about her son who's in this contest. But as a library, you cannot ask people, you cannot request people do that to enter a contest. So just make sure you read the Contacts FAQs on Facebook about that to make sure you're not doing anything you're not supposed to do. Another part of engagement is to feature BTS and that is behind the scenes. Fortune 500 companies who use Facebook say Openness. Openness is a top strategy for naturally growing your page. We do a holiday staff party every year. I work for a small organization. There's only six of us. We do a white elephant gift exchange. The photo on the left is my Nancy Pearl, a little bit damaged action figure that I received last year. And the photo on the right is of my co-worker Holly receiving some puzzles. And we post stuff like this on our page all the time because we want our librarians to see that we're real, to see that we do other things. To share that connection. If your library does things like stuff the animals sleep over, I think those are great when you invite the kids in. You read them a story. They tuck in their stuffed animals and then there's all sorts of mayhem going on overnight. I've heard that libraries get so much feedback from that, not just from kids but really from the adults. Great things. So did you get new RFID equipment? How are your books sorted? Did you recently uncover machinery in your storage closet from 1950? What did it do? Did it still work? Did one of your staff members recently have a 30th anniversary or a milestone anniversary at the library? Share that stuff. We might not think people like to hear about that, but they do. So be open and be transparent as much as you can. Number seven. Very important to show some leadership. And I'm going to talk about Red Mango. Most of us know of Red Mango as frozen yogurt. They do a lot of offers on their Facebook page, which is great. They were founded in Texas by a man named Daniel Kim and he started that company in 2006. So Daniel Kim, and this is a picture of him, he stepped down as CEO a few years ago. But as you can see, he still controls most of the content on the Facebook page and he does that to show he's genuine. The impressive thing about Red Mango is that it grew from one location in 2006 to 150 locations across the nation in four years. And he admits that when they first started out, they didn't have a lot of money, especially for marketing. And he really used Facebook as a way to get potential customers, as a way to bridge those connections, as a way to give out promotions. So I really like the leadership that he shows. Another great leader on Facebook is Bert of Bert's Bees. Most of us know of their products. A year ago they were approaching their 30th birthday or their B-day. And what Bert did was he encouraged fans to submit a message wishing them well on their 30th birthday. And then on the birthday at 4 p.m. eastern time, they did a live broadcast and people could tune in and see if the message was read. And Bert passed away over the summer. But if you look back at their old posts on Facebook, he was very active on there. I think it's great, something like this that he did, because it really puts a face with the name that shows that he cared. He shows that he's a leader. It makes our customers feel more connected when our person at the top is out there. So how can you show this leadership? I ask you, who manages your page? Is your director present? Is it someone in marketing? If you're a small library director, and if you're managing your Facebook page, I actually don't think that's a bad thing. If you are at a larger library, you need to know what people are saying. You need to know what they're talking about. How often do you look at your page? I'm hoping it's a few times a week. I know it's hard to make that time, but again, you have to know what people are saying. I would also encourage you to contribute to your page. Write a post. Share a video of what you're working on. Share a photo. Show your presence. Be more like Daniel Kim. Be more like Bert. You don't want to hog all the Facebook attention, but you need to have a presence. Better yet, does your library have a birthday or anniversary? Invite fans to send it well wishes. Maybe your director or your mascot, if your library has one, could read them. And this is something you won't have to do live. You could easily tape it and post it, you know, tape it on an iPhone. That makes me sound ancient, but tape it. You could record it on your iPhone and then post it. As I said, there's really no excuse to not have photos and videos up on Facebook these days because it's so, so easy. Number eight, we want our pages to be customer focused. A great example of this is the Humans of New York page. And a lot of you are probably familiar with this. It was started by two men in New York City in 2010. One of them had a job in finance and was just tired of that. So he wanted to go out and photograph typical everyday New Yorkers. And then he began to interview them about their lives and include short stories and quotes. As you can see, they have a ton of Facebook fans. It is a great page. So as I said, he just, he likes to capture daily things of New Yorkers. This was taken on September 19th. And here's the caption. You can go ahead and read that. It's quite humorous. This is just, like I said, a basic New Yorker, someone they run into on the streets. Very funny. This is another humorous one. It's a woman. And look at the amount of shares. 4,000 shares, over 260,000 people like it. Humorous. You also get stuff that's really heart-wrenching, such as something like this. These are two boys sitting on a couch. And this is the caption. And this is part of the series on the Syrian Americans. I'm seeing a lot of features now on this page on refugees. It's really, really moving to hear their stories. And again, if it's not a page you're familiar with, I definitely recommend that you check it out. So what does it mean to be customer focused? It means that we want to follow as best we can the 80-20 rule. And by this, experts suggest that we post non-promotional content 80% of the time and the promotional content going on at our libraries 20% of the time. Our promo content would be anything from events going on, book collections, things for sale, those types of things. Those are all types of promotional content. The 20% would be things that the Humans of New York page does. So this is really tough. And this is not what we're used to. But I would encourage you to try this. Maybe instead of 80-20, we start small, maybe 50-50 and see how you do. The thing is I see library Facebook pages where there are five to seven posts in a row about an event. And they're all within the same hour. And honestly, those are probably getting ignored. Who's going to keep reading those? They're probably not being read. So how do we imply this engagement? How do we focus on our customers to more of that 80%? We all have these patrons at our library. We know them. They come in every day. There might be the guy who comes in every day and sits at the fireplace in the same chair and reads the same newspaper and comes in at the same time. Why does he come in? What is his story? So we could do features. We could feature a patron every week or every month and tell their story. Like Humans of New York does that. So remember, Facebook doesn't always have to be about our events, our collections, our programs. It shouldn't be. We want to focus on that non-promotional content. Focus on the people who visit. The patrons are who would make our library is. And I think by doing some kind of feature, it's a great way to showcase who our patrons are and to be more customer focused. When I've done this presentation before, I always have a few people in the audience who mentioned that they've done this. In fact, one person said they meant to do something like this for three months. And a year later, they were still doing it because it was still popular on their Facebook page. Okay, getting away from the engagement, number nine, youth targeting options. There are two ways that you can target. And you'll want to target after looking at your insights that I talked about earlier. You can target post to fan interest and also post an end date option. So both of these options are found in your settings area. They are not automatically turned on on your pages. So you have to turn on this feature in your settings area before doing it. Once you turn on this option, when you see a post or create a post, you're going to see an object like this circle that I have circled by the red one. You're going to see this symbol. When you click that and create a post, you're going to have the option to target your post. So for my traveling Baker page, what I'm trying to do here is target this by gender, by women, and then by age. And it will tell me what my potential audience is. Now it's not as many fans as I have, but hopefully what it's going to do is it's going to direct my post to a more narrow group and I'll get better engagement. So again, this works really well when we're familiar with our fan demographics. That's one way we can target it. The other way is to post an end date. So when we use this option, what we're doing is we're determining the post lifespan in the newsfeed. We set a date and when that end date passes, no one is going to see that post in their newsfeed, even if it remains on our page. Great. Very effective for promoting events going on at our library. So if you have a library event happening on December 18th, you can set it up so it does not show up in anybody's feed after that. So to do this, when you form a post, you're going to go to the publish area. You're going to click on the little white arrow and the post end date option will be under schedule. Scheduling is also another great option, especially if you're really busy. You could set up event posts for the entire week. So targeting is these options that are great to take advantage of if you haven't already. Number 10, we want to make sure we're using links correctly. So there are two ways to share links on Facebook. Simply put, you can type in or copy and paste the link in your post and people click on that. The second way is what I have shown on your screen here is that's the link format where you post the link and then it populates the title and a photo and a little bit of information about what you are posting. Some of you might be thinking, does this really matter? It does. It turns out it does because viewers generally prefer this type of link because they get some information. They know what they're going to be clicking and they know that it's not spam. I know for myself personally I like to know what I'm clicking on. I like to know where it's going to take me. What you also want to make sure you do is remove the link. So after I typed the link in my post, it populated this. I actually removed the physical link. It just makes things look a lot cleaner. So whenever you can, use the links format option. And I'm going to stop one second and just take a sip of water. Okay, number 11, we know our engaging and powerful in social media and on Facebook. But we need to be incorporating videos and not forgetting about videos. So the website Social Baker, they did a study over 2014 to 2015, a year-long study. They studied 670,000 posts, 670,000 on over 4,000 brand pages. And they found that the average organic reach for images is now just under 4%, whereas videos double that. So we know photos are important, but we don't want to forget about video either. How long should our video be? Same site, Social Baker, they discovered that for the best completion rate of video, we want to keep it around 21 seconds. So just under 30 seconds. A minute still has pretty good completion rate, but as you can see, anything close to three minutes has very poor completion. And I think a lot of us know once we start watching a video, the chances of us watching it for three minutes, the less we're really, really interested is really slim. Even better, the video that we take ourselves and upload directly to Facebook is going to do better. It's going to do better than a video on YouTube, a video on Vimeo. So anytime we can just upload it directly to our Facebook page, that's also going to get better hit. So we don't want to forget about videos either. For points 12 through 14, I'm going to talk about photos. As we know, photos are a huge part of Facebook. I think it's a reason a lot of us use it. We'll start with talking a little bit about cover photos. So we want to make sure we have the right dimensions, 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels long. In any software, even something basic like Microsoft Publisher and Paint in Gallery, you can set the pixels easily for any photo. So if you are doing that and something simple like that, make sure you have the correct dimensions. With the timeline format that's been in place for a few years, we have this great option of a cover photo, which we should be changing a little bit more often than our profile photo. We can change this once a month, or twice a month, or even three times a month. This is something that we can have a little bit more dynamic. And we really want the photo to be clean and bold. It's where our fans eyes are drawn when they go to our library page. McDonald's does a great job with cover photos. This was something earlier in September. It's simple, but it's just clean. It conveys action, which I like. This was another one in September, and this was, I think it meant to have the face of cutoff. It's primarily promoting the quarter counter. This is one for Pepsi. Again, clean, bold, really eye catching. And as you can see, they leave a little space empty for the profile photo to go. Nostalgia can also be a great tool. This is PepsiCo's 50th anniversary cover photo. And as you can see in the background, there's a lot of brands and a lot of cool old logos from all of their products. So collages can be really neat. You can do this on your own. If you have some old library photos or photos, again, if you're celebrating an anniversary, great thing to do. There are two collage makers that let you design a cover photo. One of them is Pick Monkey and Pick Scatter. Both great for making cover collages, and they are free. I see this a lot, a library building as a cover photo. And I'm torn on it. I used to really not like it. Now I don't dislike it as much. This is actually my neighborhood library. It's a block from my house. I love it. It's awesome. I like this photo. I don't know that it should be a cover photo because to me, there's more to our library than our building. To me, this doesn't speak to what our library is and does and the people that visit our library. On the flip side, this is a cover photo from the same library a month later that they used. And this I like actually a lot better. I like that they use their library card as a bookmark because I think it helps with the branding. It makes it recognizable. So this one I like much better. I think we want to keep our cover photos dynamic. Kids laughing at a story time. People having fun. Of course with kids, you want to make sure you get permission. But we want our cover photos to be dynamic. This is our current one. It is a little bit more cleaner than what you see. But we're in a brick building. It's really boring. So I'm not going to show our building as our cover photo. But continuing education, these are two librarians helping each other at a training. Training, education, bringing librarians together. This is what we do. This is what we're part of. So to me, this is what we represent. Profile photos. Again, we want to have the correct dimensions. 60 by 160. And I'm guessing a lot of you use logos as your profile photo. I think that's great. If you have a statue or something outside your library that the community knows of, I think something like that is really great too. But again, it should be something that people recognize. And this is something we want to keep stagnant. Because remember, any time your library shows up in a news feed, any time it comments on another page or likes another page or applies to another page, that's what's going to show up. So we want to keep this really consistent. A great example of a cover and a profile photo is this is an old feature on KLM. KLM, another great website. I'm sorry, Facebook page, by the way. When you talk about customer response, look at some of their posts and they respond to every customer about flight times and why they missed a flight and this and that. They do a great job with that. But I love this cover and profile photo because the KLM is also going to show up in all of their posts. Okay, post photos. Choose one, two, or three. How many photos are posted to Facebook daily? What do you think? It's taking depth. Yeah, it's 350. 350 million. That's a lot. So with that many, with that many photos being uploaded a day to Facebook, we know Facebook behind the scenes is doing from major shrinking and manipulating and we know it because we see it, right? When we upload a photo, we're like, oh, that wasn't quite right because they're doing something to it. So when we're uploading an image to our timeline, a thumbnail is generated to automatically fit that box of 470 by 470. So we want to make sure we're using that maximum space and the square photos that we upload generally work the best. As far as post photos, if you have a few of them, I think anything from three to five, that works great in a type of collage. You know, if we just have a few photos sitting out there, I don't know that people are going to click on each one. So that's when I think a collage works great. Be funky. BE funky is a great app that you can use on your desktop or on your phone for creating collages. Pick monkey that I mentioned before also has that capability as well. I know scrapbookers don't generally like this because they can't see the whole photo, and I understand that. But, you know, again, for just posting something on Facebook, I think it works great. As far as other post photos, we want to keep them dynamic. This is from a recent event at one of our libraries. They should be natural. The ones of the donor handing your library director of a check is fine. I know it makes your donor happy, but it's very interesting. So we want things again that are dynamic. Kids laughing. Staff hanging up decorations. Face painting. Getting pictures of people reading. Anything like that, I think, makes for great photos. Okay, we're almost there. Last but not least, we want to strongly consider spending some money. So for a little bit of a dollar a day, you can buy and add or promote your page. And the cool thing about doing this is that you can control your budget and edit this as you want. As I mentioned, it's not super expensive. It's great for targeting. It tracks your data. And I do believe it gives you an edge because a lot of people, a lot of libraries aren't doing it quite yet. And as I mentioned, there are some people who think the only way you can grow a page is to buy ads. And I hate to say it, but I do think this is going to become a bigger part of Facebook's future where a lot of us will be doing that. You can also boost a post. So anytime you post something, you have this option, this little blue box, where you can boost a post. And by doing that, hopefully your post is going to appear higher. Again, it's very easy to do. You can choose your audience and it's very effective in reaching fans. So I have used both of these options, not on my Facebook page for work, but for my personal Traveling Baker page. I also recently pulled some librarians in our state about who was currently using Facebook ads. And the library director in Whitewater, Wisconsin said they boosted their Big Re kickoff event and they got 60 people to attend and typically they only get 15 to 20, which is pretty great. Another person said at his old library, they spent $20 to boost a post and they reached thousands and thousands of people. So in his opinion, it was money well spent. He also suggested starting small. Try spending $10 or $20 to see what type of exposure you get on one of your posts or the paper reached. And you really might be surprised. So the general consensus I'm hearing is that people are finding it worthwhile. And again, it's something where you can start small. So I would consider doing that. I just want to show the resources here and those will be in the slide deck after the presentation. And I think it's really important to remember the takeaways. I just threw a lot of information at you. These were the 15 points I talked about. But I want you to think about what is something you could change tomorrow. Hopefully what I talked about gave you some pretty easy, changeable ideas. Something that you could improve pretty simply on Facebook right now. And that was really the whole point of this. I'm also interested in hearing about what have you done that has been effective on Facebook? I think that's really important. When I talk about this presentation at other conferences, I always get a lot of great ideas from audience members as to what has been effective and what hasn't been effective. All right. Well, Jeannie, I think we have time for some questions. I just want to say thank you for sharing all of this information that you've shared so far. I, for one, I don't know about all of you listening and watching, but I am really excited to go try some of these things on some of the Facebook pages I work on. So thank you very much for sharing them. You're welcome. Great, great. Now, we have had, I just want to say we've had a lot of questions. We've got great attendance at this webinar today. And I want to assure everybody that if we don't get to your question right now, we are going to follow up with you via email. And I know there have been a couple of technical questions coming in. And I just want to say that those, I think we're going to address via email partly because it's easier to send you maybe some link and some specific descriptions on how to do something than it is to try and describe it right now in a short period of time. So for those technical questions, we'll get back to you in email. But Jeannie, we've had a lot of general questions. And I want to go back to something you talked about at the beginning, which was the dormant or old pages that you have. And we've got a couple questions kind of along these lines. You know, when you have those older pages, is it better to delete them and start over or to try to go back and revive that older page and get it going again? What would you recommend? Yeah, I would say it would depend on if you have a large fan base already, I think it would be okay to try to like revive it again. You know, get it going again. If you don't have a lot of fan pages, you're probably better off just deleting it and starting over. Great, great. And so that sounds like it really depends on the amount of engagement you've had so far. Now also in terms of engagement, we had a question about the type of engagement you have with user comments instead of like followers that are commenting but aren't really asking questions. Do you think that it's worth responding to those types of comments or just letting them sit? What do you think? I think that would depend on how much time you have. So I think you want to engage with your customers as much as you can. If it's just, if it's not a direct question, I don't know that you have to respond to every single thing because eventually it's probably just going to die off. But I think as much as you can respond, the more you can do it, the better. Because like I said, with the person and at the roller jam, toward the end I think a lot of it was just commenting like, oh, I'm really excited. And for that person to come back and say, yeah, we can't wait to have you, it just made me feel kind of good. It makes people feel like you care and I think it's just a better, it's just part of your customer service package too. Great. Another question about engagement, going to the topic about, or the tip about contests. We actually had a couple of different questions. But one was about how do, you know, they've tried contests and they haven't really had people participate in them. So do you have any recommendations for encouraging more participation in contests? I would say if they haven't done anything, you know, with kids. And I don't, it's hard to answer not knowing exactly what they've done. But I think anytime you can fix, you can feature things that kids have done. Because I think you will get adults sharing that information. I mean, I know, you know, if my nephew or niece is in some kind of contest, I'm going to go to that page and vote for it. Because I want them to win. So I think anything having to do with kids can help. Great. So maybe a kid-oriented contest. Maybe not for the kids themselves, but something that involves them in some way. Definitely something they might be interested in. And then you also showed an example that used a hashtag and somebody just asked, is it important to develop a hashtag for those contests, or is that optional? I would develop, if you're doing a contest over a span of 10 days or 12 days, I would develop a hashtag for that. Because then you can also use it on Twitter or use it in your posts as well. All right. If I'm contest over a day, I don't know that you need to, but if it's over a series, I think when you look at the brewers over 100 days, if I type that hashtag in my search, I'm going to get all of those posts showing up in my feed. Excellent. So we also, when you talked about posting pictures of patrons featuring library users, what they're doing in the library, both on the page itself, I think you referenced the Humans of New York example, but also maybe in the cover image. We got quite a few questions about privacy, what privacy concerns there might be of featuring patrons. And so I'm wondering how you recommend handling that. And I'm assuming that you would talk to the patron first before posting their picture as a feature on your Facebook page, but maybe I misunderstood that. No, absolutely. I know what some of our libraries have done, even if they're just at an event or at a story time or at some kind of party, is that they will make an announcement before it begins that someone is going to be going around taking photos that might appear on our Facebook page. If you do not want your child featured, let us know, and they will usually have them sign like a general waiver, but they will make sure that that child is not secured in any of the photos. I think nine times out of 10, most people don't have a problem with it, but it's definitely understandable if people do. So I think it's a good idea. It might be something you want to check with your city attorney or someone like that to just see what rules and regulations or suggestions they might have, but definitely you want to get people's permission, and it's probably even better to have something available in writing as well just to make sure you're covering yourself. Yeah, you definitely don't want to just go take pictures. You want to ask for permission on that. Great, great. I know the question that often comes up when we talk about social media is that privacy and considering our patrons. I know there was at least one question out there that came from a different type of library related to that privacy. So I'll say we're definitely maybe a little more focused on the public library side of things. So if you have other concerns, you can come in with your policies within your library and know what the best practices are there just for taking photos and sharing them in general. I think that's a good thing that we should all be aware of. But maybe just one more thing to end on here. Jamie, I know you said to us, you listed the takeaways and said, what's one thing we might be able to start on tomorrow? From your perspective, what's the takeaway that you recommend starting with out of these 15 tips you've just shared? I think more than anything, you have to start with that basic maintenance and you have to ask yourself, does our library staff have the time and have the knowledge to keep these things going, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Pinterest? I think what happens a lot in libraries and maybe not just libraries, maybe other organizations too, is that something new and kind of cool comes along and we kind of jump on that bandwagon without giving it a lot of thought as to how we're going to maintain them. And so I really think it's, I know it's so basic, but it starts with that basic maintenance. Who is going to maintain that? We had a multi-type organization. Actually, I deleted our page a year ago because someone else started it. It's that I'll for a year, I deleted it. And I got some pushback from that. But honestly, when I put the question out there, okay, who is going to maintain this, I didn't get any response. And to me, that told me we just didn't have the time to maintain it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But like I said, to me, it's kind of like walking into a library and seeing a bunch of broken computers or a bunch of computers that have out-of-water signs on them. You have patrons and users who are solely online. And if we have a bunch of pages out there and sites that aren't working or aren't updated, that's just like that out-of-water sign. So it really starts with that basic maintenance. All right, all right. So I think we're all ready to go then, ready to go get our Facebook pages back up to speed and very energized about this. So Jamie, thank you again for sharing all of this. And also we've got your email. I just want to remind all of you that you will receive an archive of this. And so you'll get the copy of the slides and all of the links that we've shared. We've been gathering the extra links and we will respond to those questions we didn't get to in time here live on the webinar. So thank you for sitting with us through this fantastic webinar. I hope you'll stay on the line for just another minute. Oh, yeah, Jamie, go ahead. I just want to say, and feel free to Facebook friend me too. Oh, excellent. And brands and like other people. So feel free to do that. Yeah, and Jamie's an excellent Facebooker, so it's great to learn from her example. So I have just a couple of announcements and then at the end we have a short survey. So if you can stay on the line, I hope you'll stay online and take our brief feedback survey. But I wanted to share a couple of upcoming TechSoup webinars that might interest you. On January 7th, you can learn more about getting technology donations through TechSoup. And on January 27th, later in the month, we'll have a library-specific webinar on how to provide technology training for library staff to help your library staff become more tech-savvy. And you can register for these webinars and view archives of past webinars at TechSoup.org. If this is your first time attending a TechSoup for Libraries webinar, I hope you'll visit us online at TechSoupforLibraries.org and learn more about what we have to offer. And there's also a place if you have a story or some expertise to share, you can tell us about that on our Get in Touch page, which is on the TechSoupforLibraries.org website. Again, please stay on the line for just one more moment and take a brief survey about today's webinar. Thanks again to Jamie for sharing her expertise. And thanks to ReadyTalk for being our sponsor for the webinar today. Thank you for joining us and have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.