 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar. What can libraries count, getting a grip on social media numbers? My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. In just a moment, I'll introduce our guest for today who's going to help us gain a better understanding of what matters when it comes to social media analytics in public libraries. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. Today, we'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting, and please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will 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 only come to us the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a question. Simply just type it into the chat box. 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So again, thanks for joining us for today's webinar, What Can Libraries Count? Getting a Grip on Social Media Numbers. Now, we've had a number of social media webinars over the past year, each focusing on how to best create content for a different social media platform. In today's webinar, we're going to learn how to look at the data about our social media, the numbers that tell us how many and how much. Our guest is going to help you make sense of your social media analytics. Our guest today is Laura Solomon, who is the Library Services Manager for the Ohio Public Library Information Network. She's also written three books about social media and content marketing, specifically for libraries, and has a blog about technology and libraries, which we'll share with you later. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Jenny Meese and Becky Wiegen from the TechSoup team. And again, we'll be on Twitter using the atTechSoup4Libs handle with a number 4 in there. We'll put that in the chat to make sure you get it, and also the hashtag TS4Libs. Now, we will have time for questions throughout the webinar. Please send us your questions using the chat as they arise, and we will address as many as we are able to. If you ask any questions that we aren't able to answer during the webinar, we will follow up later with a response via email. And this webinar is being recorded again, and all of those slides and resources and materials will be included in the archive, which we will send to you later this week. Before I hand things over to Laura, we wanted to just get a sense of who is here in the room today and what brings you here. And we wanted to know, are you currently tracking social media numbers for your library? Or if you've joined us from a nonprofit, you're welcome to say from your organization. So just click the response and click submit, and then you'll be able to see who else is in the room today. And I know we have people joining from all over seeing the states that have joined us today, so it's great to have a wide representation and welcome to all of you. So as you see, a lot of responses are still coming in. But as we can see, the majority at this point are currently tracking some social media numbers. There's a fair percentage that are not, though, and that's good maybe you're here to learn how to get started and get some ideas on what's going to be most important for you to look at as you do that. And I see that some people aren't sure, and that's perfectly okay. I know sometimes we aren't sure what others in our organization are already doing. So wherever you are coming from today, whatever your experience is, I think you'll be able to pick up some ideas that will either help you get started or help you continue on this path. It looks like most of our people have responded now, so we'll go ahead and close the poll in just 3, 2, and 1. You can see those final numbers there. The majority are tracking, but definitely some who are not doing so yet and you've come to the right place. Now for those of you, a follow-up poll, for those of you who are tracking social media, tell us how are you using them? And you can check all that apply. Of course, if you check that last response that you aren't currently actually using those numbers that you're tracking for any purpose, that's probably the only selection you'll make there. And then the other three options there, do you report to administrators on those numbers? Do you influence your social media strategy? Or is there some other use that you have for them? And if you select other, we'd love to hear in the chat what it is specifically that you're doing that falls into that other category. Let's see if a few of you have selected that. So we see these responses coming in. I can see that about 60, over 60% are definitely reporting to administrators and influencing social media strategies in some way. About 15% saying not using them for anything at this point. And hopefully you get some ideas on what's going to make those numbers most useful for you today from Laura's presentation. And thanks to those of you who are typing into the chat to let us know. I see somebody says they use them for grant reporting purposes specifically. That's another very important use, not just administrators, but grant reporting. And somebody said that they track the numbers to quantify how much time they spend working on social media on their performance appraisal. So that's a really good example as well. Thank you for sharing those. All right, give another few seconds here before we close the poll. So go ahead and select your responses if you haven't done so yet. And we'll close the poll in 3, 2, and 1. It's great to see how it is you're using those social media numbers for those of you who are already tracking them. I see some questions also coming in here, so we'll keep track of those and do a Q&A session at the end. But right now it's time for me to hand things over to Laura so we can hear her talk about what it is we can count in our social media numbers. So Laura. Thanks, Crystal. Hi, everyone. This is where I do my rising guy impression. Can you hear me now? Just type into the chat, yes or no? All right, I see yeses. All right, awesome. Okay, I'm going to warn you right up front. I'm not going to mince any words here. This is the tip of the iceberg today. This is what I can do in a short amount of time, and you may guess that by the end going, well, I didn't find out what I wanted to know. Well, that's why we have a Q&A at the end. And you're certainly also welcome to follow up with me, especially because we've got, gosh, how many social media channels and different kinds of libraries we're talking about today and all kinds of things and variables. So I'm happy to do what I can, but I just want you to kind of keep that at the front of your mind today. This is kind of an introduction to some things, and I'm glad to see that most of you are tracking. And Dallin says, you mean the Sprint guy now? Yes, I know. I heard he worked for Sprint, which I thought was pretty funny, but I don't think he's saying, can you hear me now? So let's get Guy right into our topics today, because there is quite a bit to cover. Oh, and by the way, you already saw a picture of me. I do work from home primarily. I am a telecommuter. However, I do not work in my pajamas. I can't force myself to work when I'm in my pajamas. That's usually the question I get asked the most about telecommuting. So I always try to answer that up front. So this is me, but this is really what you came for today. And let's just a brief overview. So as you read in the description for this workshop, social media analytics are really a hot mess, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and neither should you. And when you're dealing with your administrators, and we're going to talk about that towards the end, it's something that we do have to keep in mind. We're going to talk about why. But we are going to get used to it, and some of you may already have. The matter of metrics, which one should we be tracking? Which ones matter the most? We're going to talk about that as well. And then lastly, as I've already mentioned, we're going to talk about talking to administrators. And it was interesting to me to see that on that last poll that the largest number of people reporting numbers were doing so primarily to report to administrators more so than to influence their strategy going forward. And I don't think that's unusual. I'm not surprised terribly by that number, but it does mean that it's something that we have to manage on top of everything else when we're doing social media work. So we're going to cover that a little bit as well. And one of the questions that I saw, and actually from Heather, and I want to actually answer this now. Crystal, don't kill me, but I think it's appropriate to do so. And Heather asked, I'm curious if social media numbers are purposely tracked to report to administrators. Why do the administrators want those numbers? And I think that's a very good question. And I want you to hold on to that. We're going to get to that. So I'm not going to answer it now, but I want you to know that it is actually going to be part of the presentation. So welcome to the jungle, this hot mess that we have to deal with. The first thing I want to do is bore you with the chart. No, just kidding. I don't want to bore you with this chart, but I think this chart is very pertinent to kind of this mess that we all are working with. This chart is from the 2015 social media marketing trend report that TrustRadius, a large marketing company released last year. And it highlights several key findings and trends that you can see here. And I think probably the most important one for what we're addressing today is this top one. And hopefully most of you know what ROI is. It's a business term, but it does have some relevance to us. It's return on investment. So what are you getting out of all of your putting into this effort? This poll was directed towards marketers not in the nonprofit sector, but primarily the profit sector. And of the marketers surveyed, 60% named measuring ROI as one of their top three challenges. And 50% said that tying social media activities to business outcomes was also one of the top three challenges. So Laura, what does this mean to me in plain English? It means frankly, folks, we're not alone. Everyone is struggling with this. Even the professional marketers who are working for Fortune 500 companies are having issues and there's all kinds of reasons for that. And of course being a hot mess, the social analytics are, is probably one of the primary reasons. But what it does mean, and probably I'm going to guess why many of you are here today, is that we are all frustrated. Some of us are more frustrated than others. And I know certainly this is me, not obviously a picture of me, but this expression has certainly crossed my face multiple times. So I mentioned there's all kinds of problems. So let's talk about what those are, why this is such a jungle and a hot mess. When I say platform, I'm talking about social media channel. I'm talking about Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, Snapchat, whatever. They have numbers, but those numbers aren't always counted the same from platform to platform. And anybody who works with database statistics, this is probably a familiar scenario to you because those are also problematic for all kinds of similar reasons. Some platforms have numbers that may not even exist in other channels or necessarily be equivalent to other channels even if they're called the same thing. And also there's no absolute guidelines. I get asked this a lot. What should our numbers look like? But there are no absolute guidelines to say things like you should have this many likes on your library's Facebook page or you're doing a subpar job. There is no such number for anybody, not just libraries. Some types of things you can't even get a number for. For example, if someone shares a note on Facebook, not just a regular post, but Facebook has notes for longer content. If someone shares that and you created it, you don't know how many people actually saw it. You can count the share, but after it's shared, you can't tell how many people saw it. There's no way to really get that number. So there's all kinds of little things contributing to our frustration. On top of that, we have a bigger kind of elephant in the room that doesn't get talked about a lot, and I'm not going to talk about it a lot today, but I want you to know about it if you don't already. Studies consistently show that about 70% of all the social sharing on the web is considered dark. So what does that mean? It means that social content is being shared in a way that we can't see and we can't track. For example, email, if somebody like my in-laws do this all the time, they forward email. Now you might be laughing because people don't do that as much anymore, but people of a certain generation, I assure you I'm victimized by this constantly, they do share emails. I'm not talking about an email campaign that your library did. I'm talking about, okay, grandma saw a really cute doggie picture and forwarded it to her nephew. You can't count that. E, direct messages. You can't count those on any platform. Texting, there's no way to track texting if you want to count that as well. What about the person who loves that meme or cartoon or that social media post that you created? And puts it up on their organization's bulletin board. How do you count that? You can't. So 70% of what's going on under the hood of social media, we can't see it. We can't track it. We can't do anything. So when you're talking about social media analytics, you're really only talking about a 30% of the potential whole, not very much. And because we love to complicate things even more in real life, public libraries, actually all libraries, we don't have conversions, not really. If you're not familiar with conversions, let me introduce you to it very quickly. Conversion is when a user takes a specific desired action. So for a retail site like Amazon, for example, defining a conversion is pretty easy. Someone came to the website and they bought something. They got from point A coming to the website to point B buying something. Even for other not-for-profits, figuring a conversion is often relatively simple because typically they want you to take a specific action like donate money. So if somebody came to the website, they donated money. They want you to sign up to be a volunteer. So you came to the website and you signed up to be a volunteer. They want you to contact the legislature through their form. They can count that. In all of those instances, those are clear actions that the site owners want the visitors to take and so they can count those as conversions. And conversions have historically and always pretty much been the holy grail of web metrics. It's a thing that really matters. Did the website or post help users take the desired action or not? But for libraries doing social media, there's rarely this conversion factor. There's not often an ultimate clear act that defines a conversion. First of all, we typically don't deal with monetary transactions. So that's the big hindrance right there. So the economic value is at best murky. But there are a couple exceptions here with conversions and maybe some of you are already doing this with your social media analytics. The two that I thought of off the top of my head and if you've got others, please type them in the chat. We'll share them. But the two that I thought of, placing a hold online. So for example, you post about the newest James Patterson book and someone clicks that link and goes through to your catalog and places a hold. You may be able to track that. That's a conversion. Registering online for a program. You're promoting a program. You have a link to your software for registration. You can track that. Those are examples of library conversions, but they're few and far between. We don't have these as the holy grail like a lot of other organizations do. Fortunately for us, this isn't new. Firstly, all library administrators are familiar with proving having this sort of dilemma of having to prove concrete return on investment. And libraries generally provide access to information. Historically, that goal has also been kind of difficult to benchmark. We get a lot of different statistics traditionally to try to figure our value. We've got physical visitors. We've got circulation counts, program attendees, even website visits. And even with all of those numbers at our disposal, there's still not often this immediate clear way to say for example, one visit to the library equals X dollars in ROI. So this might actually be less of a leap for us as library staff to kind of come to this understanding that measuring content marketing and social media is this really murky, cloudy territory. Less so maybe than it might be for someone coming to this from outside of libraries. So perhaps when we're used to this idea that measurement isn't always going to be a clear cut process, which it turns out is a really good thing since there's all of this debate and this murkiness. So measuring social media is at best an inexact science. That's the big takeaway today. And even if you want to call it a science, it might be more of an art. But nonetheless, we need to know if what we're doing has some effect and how we can of course do it better. The need for metrics is always going to be there even if the process is in flux. So let's talk about metrics and how we deal with those. So the first thing I want to do is maybe shift your thinking just a little bit about the kinds of metrics that you're looking at. Some are worth more than others. In other words, not all metrics or all engagement is created equal. Now engagement is typically what we're going for in social media, which is kind of this broad category if anything. It's massively broad. But I want you to think about these. We're used to measuring these and they're very easy statistics to gather. So likes and favorites and click-throughs and reach, how many people saw something, retweeting where you just click Retweet. These are all pretty easy actions. In fact, they are very passive forms of engagement. And it's the lowest barrier of entry for most people online. That's the minimum action required. So you move them out and you click. Anyone can do this. It's very passive. It's like nodding your head when you're talking to someone. It's the bare minimum. So it's just an indication of appreciation, which yes, it is important but it's not really an indication that they're intending to take any action or do anything with this content that you're providing. Passive engagement is the easiest thing they can do and it doesn't take a lot of effort and it doesn't indicate passion for the content. So we need to think about what we're tracking a little differently. This is low barrier. This is easy stuff. But we should be giving more weight to these. That doesn't mean that click-throughs and retweets without any kind of additional commentary are worthless. That's not true at all. But I want you to think about your analytics for social media and kind of three tiers. The first one being passive, the second one being these that require more effort. It's a lot more active than just moving a mouse and clicking a button, right? So this requires the action of forming a thought or an opinion and typing it out and essentially putting themselves out there for people to see. There's more of a risk and it's a higher barrier. It should be treated differently. There's more intent in these kinds of actions. So this is our second tier. What's the third and most desirable tier? You might have already guessed. It's the gold standard and that is sharing. This is why you are always hearing about, oh this went viral and everybody goes ooh and off. The case of shares, that's where the gold is. If you create something that's so nifty or useful to your fans that they think their friends and family need to know about it, you yourself have become interesting and useful. And so when you've created content that actually generates shares, you need to take a look specifically at that content and do a lot more of it. And I saw that a good number of you from one of the poll questions are in fact using your analytics to guide your strategy as you go along. So that's important. But you found a sweet spot when this happens, when you get the shares. Shares are the most important and these are the kinds of things you want to be focusing on. Now if your stuff never gets any shares, you've got kind of a different problem that we can't address today because today we are just doing numbers. So keep that in mind. Okay, so let's talk about some specific things. We like specificity. Okay, so this is actually the Facebook Insights tool. I'm hoping many of you are familiar with at least some parts of this. It's fairly extensive. But this is actually from my organization's Facebook page. And this is a nifty section that I use probably more than any of the others and that's post. And that allows you to look at individual posts and see what their stats are. In my mind, these are much more important than the overall numbers because I'm primarily looking at these numbers again to guide what I'm doing in the future. So if I take a look at this and I'm keeping one eye on the chat, I see some questions very come in so I want to get to those at some point probably toward the end. And by the way, you will note by looking at this that we do pay for reach. Maybe this is a different topic and we'll talk a little bit about later but hopefully most of you are putting out a little money to boost posts at this point. If you're not, you've got different issues. But when I take a look at this, and this is just from about a week's worth of stuff or so, I can take a look at this and say, okay, well some of these posts went farther than others. Some of them went farther than others because of money. Some of them actually did okay organically meaning that there was no money. But in particular, I like to look at the engagement which is over towards the right. And in fact from this particular week and this is almost kind of a surprise to me, one of the posts that got the most engagement this week was not a paid post. It was actually one that was organic and it was simply a picture of the Oakland core. In other words, it was a big server rack with an awful lot of cables that were a big mess. And people were for some reason entertained by that for better and for worse. And so it actually got quite a bit more engagement than some others. I see Janice says, when I look at this page on my Facebook, I get a different screen. Where is this one? When you go to Insights, it's going to be on the left here under Posts. Let's see if I can highlight it. Right there, Insights is up at the top. Okay, so let's keep moving on with Facebook. I have to keep poking things here in the interface. Sorry. Okay, one thing I think that people tend to not realize is there that I think is just as important in the Facebook Insights interface. This is actually hidden. I'm going to highlight this again. It's up here in this little drop-down arrow. This option to see Post Hides, Hide of All Post, Reports of Spam, Unlikes of Page. Why do you want to see that? This is the negative feedback. People don't tell you unfortunately why they're hiding your post or why they're, I don't know, maybe reporting you for spam, hopefully not, but why they're unliking your page. It's important to know not just what people like so you can do more of it, but also what people don't like. Now in this case, when you look at the most impressive post, I guess, in terms of engagement, which is the one from August 4th, that one about the server core, actually someone caused them to hide the post. Now why? Was it that badly organized the server rack? I don't know. I'll never know why, but it's nice to see those numbers and know what you're doing, is working or not, or actually actively turning people off. Now if you're seeing one person, like in this case there's one person actually a little farther down, there's one more person. I don't know and I will never know what offended them or maybe they were just overwhelmed with stuff and they didn't find it interesting. I'll never know why those people decided to take some kind of negative action, but make sure that you look at this so that you are also getting that information. I'm pushing the wrong button. Sorry folks, let's do that. Okay, that's much better. So Twitter, Twitter is kind of a different ball game, but it does have some very similar analytics in many ways to Facebook. And you can get to it by the way if you're logged in directly from the URL that you see at the top of the slide, or you can also when you're logged in get to this dashboard by going to Settings and then to Analytics. Either one will get you here. And you can also, again this gives you kind of that broad overview that you saw on that first Facebook slide, but you can get more granular results much like you do on Facebook. So let me back up a little bit. It's circles here. You can see View, Tweet, Activity. And that's how you can get, you'll get a modal box here. So this was just, this is from my personal account by the way, not from my organization. So this was just a funny one-off I put out there one morning. I feel like there's not enough caffeine in a five mile radius to make me alert today. So maybe some of you can relate to that. So it got 197 impressions, meaning that 197 people theoretically saw it in their feed. The total engagement, it does give you the total and it breaks it down by likes and replies. There were no retweets on this one. One interesting thing to note by the way, if you're looking at 197 impressions and thinking that's not very many, you're absolutely right. It's not. Especially when you consider I have over 3,000 followers. So my bragging, no. But my point is that this is a small percentage of my following that actually got this for better and for worse. But for a library that would be worse. And it's one of the reasons that you may have heard this advice already that you need when you're tweeting, this is not applicable to other channels so much. This is specific to Twitter. You need to put things out multiple times. That doesn't mean spam all day, but it does mean do things several times during a day or a time period because people will not see it because stuff goes by so fast. So Twitter has something very similar. It also has, now I didn't show this in the Facebook Insights, but hopefully many of you have at least seen the demographic information available in Facebook Insights. Analytics for Twitter has something very similar, but they also have this section I wanted to highlight because I don't think Facebook has anything there that much like this. And for Twitter, I think this is invaluable. And that's this interest section. Now I bet if you look at most interest for most Twitter accounts, the first thing that's going to come up for your followers is their interest is politics and current events. And that's simply because that's the kind of channel Twitter is. So I tend to tune that one out, particularly because I don't really do so much in the way of political posts and our organization certainly doesn't. So I kind of skip over that one. And it's interesting, I consider myself to be, I have a tech blog. It's most of what I do. But interestingly enough, most of what my folks are interested in are book and library stuff because I have a lot of library followers apparently who are not actually techs. And then tech is second or third down there. And it's interesting to see the conversation of the techs. The people are talking about their needs for caffeine and I totally relate to that. So what about Instagram? I can't cover every channel today obviously, but I wanted to cover three of the big ones. Instagram unfortunately, even though it's kind of gotten pretty big, it doesn't have its own analytics. And I sure hope that they do this really, really soon because they sure need it. But you have to use third-party tools to get your stats out of Instagram. Why? I'm not sure why. And by the way, this slide for those of you who are going Instagram-y. This is from the Forester Report. This was last year. This is engagement rate. So if you're thinking about, if engagement is one of your goals, then you definitely want to be looking at Instagram because it's actually higher than most of the other channels. It is 10 times higher than on Facebook. It's 54 times higher than on Pinterest, and whopping 84 times higher than on Twitter, just as an FYI. So if you need tools, you're going to get a copy of the slides or you can get a copy of the slide, or you can grab this URL now. But there are many free tools. Here are simply six that Brandwatch suggests. My organization doesn't use Instagram, so I can't tell you which tool I use. But if you have one you'd like to recommend to the group, you can certainly put that into the chat and they'll not tweet that out, but put that back out for you. So I mentioned engagement being one of the potential goals for social media. This is just a chart. It actually appears in my newest book, but with common goals and associated metrics. So the things that you're after kind of matched up with the goals that you might have. Each of the things that's listed under the goal, like for example under brand awareness, website traffic, page views, video views, each of those things is called a KPI or a Key Performance Indicator. This is a marketing term, don't be scared, but if you start looking at this stuff you're going to see it everywhere because it is the term everyone uses for these analytics is your KPI. If you ever talk to a marketer about your analytics or your marketing, your library, they're going to ask you, what's your KPI for this or that? That's what they're talking about. But let's talk about this a little bit. You shouldn't be tracking metrics if you can't have any effect on them with your actions. You need to be looking at metrics as your guide to what and how you're going to improve in the future. And maybe you decide what those are, not your boss. But understanding where your blog traffic comes from for example, knowing that it comes from say Twitter most of all is going to help you improve it, especially because you can go look at your Twitter analytics and go okay, this is what people are interested in. By knowing what topics resonate with your audience it's a part of understanding your post performance of course. But if your library is never going to spend money for promoted posts on Facebook, why are you measuring reach? Why do you care? And that leads to a very important question, would your library spend money to change this number? If the answer is no, I ask you to consider why you're tracking it because the whole point of this is to change those numbers. So if you're not talking about okay we're going to start spending more on this kind of thing, why are you tracking those things? Because you're not going to affect it necessarily in many ways. And the sad truth is particularly with Facebook it's starting to happen very slowly with Twitter and Instagram, but it hasn't gotten to that point yet. They're starting to monetize. Facebook has been monetized and many of you may already know. Facebook is almost entirely a pay-to-play environment. But you don't need much money. I mean that's almost a different presentation. But don't measure what you can't change. I want you to give that some thought today because there's lots of numbers, there's lots, okay? So I want to finish up because I know we've got lots of questions. But talking about your administrators and how we talk to them, and I know that one of the questions early on was why do administrators care about these numbers? Maybe this will enlighten you about why they care about these numbers. Admins whether they're directors or managers or supervisors, whatever they're called care about the overall goals of a library. So when you're reporting on social media you have to keep this at the forefront of what you're doing. Take a good hard look at your library's strategic plan, which is entirely separate maybe from your social media goals, although I'm going to tell you they shouldn't be. What is the library trying to achieve specifically? That's really what we're going for here. And that's what your admins care about because the main and perhaps only reason for a library to use social media isn't just to be on social media. I mean, yeah, you can make the argument, well, if my library isn't on Facebook it's like you used to be not having a website or not being in the Yellow Pages. You can make that argument, but why are you bothering? You're doing anything but put up your address and your phone number. The idea is to support the library's goals. When you're talking to administrators don't forget this. Those things that are written down in your library's strategic plan those are the things your administrators have to care about. That's their job is to implement those things. So they want to hear about how you're helping with that through the social media efforts that you're making. You also have to care about are you hitting the target. When I say target I mean your audience. Promoting every upcoming program is not going to achieve this unless one of the stated goals in your library's strategic plan is to increase overall program attendance then maybe you can kind of justify that approach. But most strategic plans are more specific than that. I don't think many of us see this. Typically they have goals and strategic objectives and it's all broken down. So maybe even if increasing program attendance is a goal it's likely to be a lot more narrow like increase attendance of local business people or entrepreneurs. So you need to focus on a particular audience and it's critical especially with today's social media and not to plug my book too much but there's a whole section about this in my new book in terms of determining your audience. We can't just keep throwing things folks at the virtual wall and hoping something sticks. Our time is too valuable for that and people are too overwhelmed with content. So you need to know if you're hitting the target and that's part of whether or not you're actually helping with the implementation of the strategic plan. You also need to compare apples to apples. It can be very tempting especially for administrators and I had to deal with this myself to know how your library is doing compared to other libraries especially since there's often a tendency in our library world to look at others in our same sphere especially the big players and we think we need to be just like them. However for social media that's not going to be realistic. Yes we have the same access to Facebook that New York Public Library does. And New York Public Library by the way I think does a fabulous job of social media and they definitely can be your spirit animal and you can look to them for ideas but we have to also realize they are massive of course and they have a lot more money and a lot more staff power to throw at these efforts. So the best benchmark for your library social media work isn't other libraries. It's your library. You need to compete with yourself for the best results and do your best to make your own numbers increase over time because this shows administrators that what you're doing is working. Whether or not you're as good as New York Public Library or even your neighboring library means nothing. How much better is your work getting? It's your previous performance that you used to looking at and your own KPIs. So the big takeaways and then we're going to get to the questions because I see there's quite a few and I want to make sure that I can address as many of those as I can. You've already seen there's a lot of factors affecting social media analytics in terms of standardization. In other words there often isn't any and so we have to recognize that because otherwise we do end up tearing our hair out and as someone who used to deal with database stats I don't think I have much hair left between this and social media. You also need to know what you're measuring and why you're measuring it which ties in with this last big takeaway which means you need to align your goals and your KPIs remember key performance indicator and your reports. Align that all together. Your job is to further the strategic goals of the library. It's not to say okay it's Tuesday what should we post on social media today. That's not your job. Your job is to figure out okay this is what we're going to post on Tuesday and it's going to meet this strategic goal. And that's a lot. That's in a brief time. So I'm going to try to get to these questions and Janice asked which public library? Yes I was talking about New York Public Library. Great. And Laura let me just jump in here. This is Crystal. And I just wanted to say this is obviously a ton of information and thank you for what you have shared with us. There is a lot to cover here and we know that we're in some ways really just scratching the surface. So I wanted to let everybody here know a couple of things. First of all the slides we are going to send those out in the archives. And also all of the links to the resources we've talked about as well as some of the tutorials. So if you're looking at some of this and saying well I'm really just dipping my toes into these analytics for the first time. Where do I access it? How do I look at these different pages and access all of it? We'll share out some of the basic tutorials so that you can go in through Facebook or Twitter for example and take a look at those analytics at the entry level and cover some of those tutorials. So we will share that with you. Laura we have had a lot of different questions here and I've just been trying to take a look at the best place for us to start. And I know you covered kind of the three big areas or three of the bigger social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One of the announcements we got in about Instagram is apparently recently there's been a change and there is a business level access now that allows some analytics through Instagram as a platform. But we also got a question as I know you shared a link with six different Instagram analytics tools. Is there any particular tool that you recommend or that you personally prefer for Instagram that you would recommend? I am glad to hear first of all that Instagram has made some baby steps towards some analytics because it's desperately needed. I hope that they do that more than just for business. And I mentioned earlier and might have bypassed this person but our organization does not use Instagram. It's not one of our channels. So having said that, I cannot speak for a specific tool. Maybe some folks in the chat if they are using something they are in love with maybe they could put a link to it. Great. Well I think that if anybody wants to share their preferences. And of course the link that you shared which we will include in the archive has six recommendations and reviews. So one of those I am sure will also be good if you are not using the business side of that page. Now I thought this was a great question because it is kind of clarifying what you are saying here about. We are asking you to clarify what you are saying about what matters when we measure. So I am actually just going to read this one and Allison says, I don't understand why you think that metrics are not important if we are going to pay to promote. And she uses an example. Our reach went way up when we put a more obvious follow or like button on our website and on each post. So why is pain better and how does that relate to the metrics you might track and maybe the goals that you might be setting for your social media. Wow, that is a big one. So could you read the very first part of that again because I think I lost track of something at the very beginning. Yeah, she said, I don't understand why the metrics aren't important if we aren't going to pay to promote them. And I think the metrics being that those basic counts on how many people are, I'm assuming this is what she means, those basic counts on how many hits you get, how many visits, how many clicks. Okay, well first of all all of those are examples of very passive engagement. So that is not at least what we are hoping for and probably what most of us should be hoping for. They are kind of again baby steps towards engagement. But better than nothing I think. As far as metrics not mattering when you don't pay, they do matter. And in fact if you look back at the slides, one of the slides for Facebook showed that one of the most popular posts that week was actually organic. I will tell you that that's a fluke for us just knowing what our metrics typically look like. So they do matter and organic reach does matter. The problem is that in order to get engagement you have to get stuff in front of people's eyeballs. And Facebook has made it almost impossible to do that now without putting money down. Maybe that will clarify a little bit. Great. And if there are further questions on that please send them into the chat if we didn't get your question answered all the way. Now another question actually specific to Facebook that is a good follow-up here. Can you explain the reach on Facebook? Some posts for our library will have 700 to 800 reach, but then we have other posts with only a 30 to 50 reach. Why is there a huge difference? All of our reach is organic. All of the reach, okay that's good to know because I was going to ask that. Remember that with Facebook the way that their organic reach or algorithm works is that it basically puts stuff out there that gets the most engagement which almost to me seems like I catch 22. So for example if you have a post and one person likes it, Facebook isn't going to rank it very high because not very many people engaged at all with it. On the other hand if you have a post that four or five or six or more people have somehow engaged with particularly if they've commented or shared more active forms of engagement Facebook will put it out more frequently. So this is one of the reasons I tell people as soon as you post something on Facebook get all your friends to go like it. Which is stupid isn't it? I hate saying that, but you kind of have to almost gain the algorithm a little bit. Right. And there are a lot of questions coming in about how you might be able to manipulate some of that. So I'm going to try to filter through some of these and pitch out the best questions right now. But I want to switch gears a little bit because we've got a couple of people asking about retweets. And the question I see first is why are retweets not considered a type of share? What actions count as sharing? And I'm wondering if that's just a language difference between the platforms? I think that's primarily a language difference more than anything else. Just like on Twitter they don't call it likes, they call it I think favorites. Great. So then we have a question from Renee. How can we get numbers on which type of social media works best for which demographic or audience? Or do those recommendations or figures exist out there? Wow, there's a few different ways to do this. This is part of determining your audience. So if you know who your audience is going to be, so let's say you've decided, maybe you're a public librarian, what of your audience is going to be, I don't know, a stay-at-home mom bringing your kids to story time? Best way, frankly, is to ask. There is no better source than the horse's mouth. Now there is all kinds of demographic information generally speaking out there. There are even companies that will figure this out for you. I'm not plugging for Orange Boy, but there are ones that specifically does audience segmentation for libraries. I've used some of their work in my recent book. So I would say ask if you don't know who the audiences are. I mean you've got a different issue again. But start by asking the people who you're trying to target. Great. And another question actually, just curious about what the demographic is for your organization's Facebook page, and also how long have you had that Facebook page in operation for OPILIN? Good question. Oakland's Facebook page has been around prior to my arrival, which was in 2008, so I'm not exactly sure. So I'm going to guess 2006 or 2007. I don't know for sure. But I can tell you that we have two very distinct demographics that we target. And keep in mind, we are not a library. We are a state agency that basically acts as an internet service provider for public libraries in Ohio. So we're kind of this odd bird to begin with. But we have two demographics that we target because of what we do. So we provide broadband access and technology services to libraries. So probably one of our main audiences are library techs and our secondary audience because we also help provide databases, research databases statewide for public libraries. We also know that we're also talking to librarians who are not primarily working in technology. But they're our secondary audience. Great. It's nice to hear a little bit about your process there. So we've gotten a few questions just referencing other social media platforms. And I know this isn't really about how to use those platforms, but I do want to bring them up just because there might be some question or good commentary here. One person said, curious why there's no mention of Google Plus or other social networks? You've really focused on just a few platforms today. Could you tell us why? Purely time. And Google Plus honestly, for some of you maybe you have done the research and you found that it's valuable. But for the vast majority I think it just isn't. It just hasn't been very successful the platform. There's certainly other platforms libraries used. Pinterest is one, Snapchat is another, and Periscope, I mean we could go on and on. There's just not enough time. Great. And speaking of other platforms, and of course we don't have time to go into them specifically, but James mentioned putting their library branches on Yelp and TripAdvisor. And is wondering if those are considered social media sites as well, or if those are just some other type of platform. How do you classify those? I think that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Again, I'm not in a library these days. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I personally would think of them as social media because people can interact. But maybe it's a more niche version. Yeah, and actually, and that was part of his comment that I missed including that he says he's already gotten three reviews in the last few days. So they're getting some engagement there which is great to hear. So a little bit socially. All right. And we've had at least one question come in talking about other social media management platforms. And I know there was even some discussion on Twitter about this. So do you recommend using a management tool like Hootsuite or Social Sprout or some other tool that not only helps manage posts but provides additional analytics? If your library can do that, yes. I know that's not an option. I tend to work with a lot of smaller libraries. But absolutely, if you can get more numbers and those are going to help you to achieve your library's goals, I would say go for it. Great. All right. Now I'm going to go back quite a bit further. Earlier on in the webinar you did talk about negative feedback and when people hide a post or unfollow your page for some reason. And we got a question that's along those lines but a little bit different. So we all deal with negative posters. People who come in and sometimes we call them trolls or post comments that are irrelevant or maybe advertisements for other things. And do you know of any good ways to filter out those comments from your analytics if it's your policy to leave them up? It's not really about taking those comments down but how do you filter them out as a negative engagement as opposed to a positive engagement? Or just how do you approach that? Well, again, not so much an issue for us. And if anyone wants to contribute to this in the chat, in something that they do, then I think that would be awesome. I don't think there's any automatic way to do this, unfortunately, unless I'm totally missing something in all my analytics work. I think you'd have to do it manually and go, okay, this post had one unfollow but I know that someone made a nasty comment. But on the other hand, another way to look at that, I mean, assuming it's not a troll, trolls are kind of a whole other ballgame. But if it's not a troll, if it's someone who's unhappy about what the library is doing, that's still legitimate engagement. And it still means that someone engaged with the post. You may not like how they engage with the post, but as long as they're not a troll, I would count that as engagement because you mean somebody cared enough to say something. All right. Well, that's actually an interesting perspective. So I'm glad we brought that one up. Now, I just took a peek at the chat and can see that we are getting a lot of different ideas coming in. And I know that Becky from TechSoup is trying to share these out with as many people as possible. So thanks to those of you who are sharing your ideas. And I also just want to acknowledge that a few of you have asked questions that we're going to follow up with you later because we want to get you a very specific answer to what you've been asking. And we have time for just a few more questions right now before we wrap up. And I hope that you'll stay on the line because we have a brief survey at the end asking you how you felt about today's webinar. And I have just a few more announcements to share. But we've been just getting some really great discussion here in the chat. And I have just maybe two more questions that we've got time for right now. The first is just a follow-up to an earlier statement coming back to this difference between retweets and shares, and what the value is. In terms of engagement and the passive versus the more active types of engagement. And so the follow-up says, seeking clarification on the earlier statement, gold standard or shares, but also the statement that retweets are more passive and less important. And so could you just help us understand that a little bit more, Laura, what you meant there? Yeah, and I can definitely see that as being confusing. I think the idea of being, I think part of it is language and part of it is a judgment call. So technically when you share something out on Facebook, it is very much like hitting the retweet button. But the experts think of that as being more valuable than simply hitting like because you're sharing that content with others. And the idea, I think with a retweet, you are also sharing that content with others. But I think part of the thinking behind that is that stuff that includes your own commentary on Twitter rather than just a retweet tends to get more engagement on its own. So when you add, retweeting, yes, is a share, but it's still pretty passive as opposed to when you add something of your kind of your own take on it or your own commentary. It's a share, but it's more likely to be seen and to get more engagement. I don't know if that helps more, but maybe that gives a little perspective. Great, great. Well, and as you said at the beginning, Laura, this is messy. It's a messy subject, and the answers are not always clear. So we talk about them as best we can. And we have really covered a lot today. I think that is all we have time for. And so I'm going to move into wrapping up. But I know, well, first of all, Laura, thank you again for everything that you've shared with us today. And we've got your website here. We'll share this out with everybody in the archive. And I know you blog here regularly. You also have links to your upcoming presentations and a few courses on this topic that are coming up later this year. And also links to your books if you've got – so those of you who have joined us today, if you have more questions, you might find more detail in some of her books. And I just want to reference to the nitty gritty guide to social media and also her most recent release, the nitty gritty guide to content marketing. So if you want something more in depth, you might find some answers there. But also the blog just has a lot of great ideas and information. So I hope you will visit her site. I also just want to let you know about our next TechSoup for Libraries webinar, which is coming up about a month from now on September 28th, which will be on a different topic on coding clubs and different types of youth programming around coding for public libraries with a few library examples to share there. So mark your calendar and the registration info will come out soon on that. And also just to remind you about the TechSoup for Libraries website, which is where we have blog posts and library spotlights specific to libraries and technology. So we hope you will join us there. We also have a newsletter that you can sign up for to stay up to date on our webinars and other offerings. And that is really all that we have for today. So I just want to thank you all for joining us. And thanks again to Laura for sharing all of this excellent information on this very, very interesting and important topic for us, social media analytics. Thanks to ReadyTalk for being our sponsor today. And thanks again for joining us. Please stay on the line. We've got a brief survey for you to take about today's webinar. All right, have a great afternoon everyone. Bye-bye.