 Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Instagram for Public Libraries, Good Practices for Social Media. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. We have two guests today who will talk about what their libraries have done to create engaging Instagram accounts to connect with their communities. They'll share some good practices that have worked well for them. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today, so 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 will 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 will 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. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial the phone number in your confirmation email, which we've also shared in the chat. If you're having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try our best to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You'll receive an archive email within 24 hours that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIDS. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event, so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential, more effectively deliver programs and services, and better achieve your mission. Right now TechSoup is in the middle of their 2016 Storymakers program. You can submit your digital story for a chance to win some great prizes for your library. You have until May 31st to submit your entry, and TechSoup has created training resources and webinars to help you create an amazing digital story. Learn more at TechSoup.org slash Storymakers. All right, with that I think we're ready to begin. So thanks for joining us for today's webinar, Instagram for Public Libraries, Good Practices for Social Media. If you're joining us from a nonprofit or another type of organization or library, we hope you also get some great tips that you're able to apply in your organization. We have two guests joining us today. Ray Dallara joins us from Burlingame, California where he has worked at the Burlingame Public Library for the past 17 years. He's currently the Library Aid Supervisor and also serves on the web team and manages the library's Instagram account. Amanda Zuccarelli is a reference in Adult Services Librarian at the Cherry Hill Public Library in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She helps to manage the library's social media accounts including Instagram. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter we have Jenny Mies and Becky Wiegand from the TechSoup team. We'll be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs handle and the hashtag T-S-4-L-I-B-S. We will have time for questions throughout the webinar so please send us your questions using the chat as they arise and we will address as many as we're able to. If you ask questions that we're not able to answer during the webinar, we will follow up later via email with a response. This webinar is being recorded in all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive of the webinar which you should receive in 24 to 48 hours. Now in just a moment we'll hear from Amanda and Ray about their experiences and good practices. Before they begin I wanted to share just a few resources and let you know again that all of these resources we share today will be included in the archive so you don't have to write them all down right now. Now if Instagram is a new social media tool for you or your library then you might want to start off with some basics once today's webinar is over. I've included some resources here to help you get started. For one the Instagram Help Center or you might want to take a free course like the one offered at GCF Learn Free. If your library already pays for a subscription to Lynda.com there is a course there as well that you might be interested in. I'll also share some articles that highlight some of the great things libraries are doing on Instagram and I'll share that link to the Storymakers resources at TechSoup which Becky's also just shared in the chat. Now one more thing before we begin is we'd like to know a little bit about you. So tell us does your library have an Instagram account already? You can select your response by clicking the radio button and then click Submit to see the responses of everybody coming in. Now I will also say that if you have an Instagram account and you'd like to share it, you can include that in the chat now. It will come to us and I will compile all of those Instagram accounts later on and include them in the archive and that way we can follow each other's library Instagram accounts to get ideas in the future. So I can see those coming in now. We will collect all of these and put them together in the archive so you can see them all later on. So thank you for sending those in. All right so I can see it looks like most people have responded to this question and it looks like we have a little more than half do have an Instagram account so maybe you are here today to learn new ideas for how to use it. It looks like close to 40% don't yet have an Instagram account so you are maybe getting ideas on how to get started today. And I know for some of us we might not be sure maybe the library has an Instagram account but you are not aware of it so that is completely okay as well. All right so thanks for sending in your accounts. You can continue to send those in but I am going to go ahead and close this poll now since it looks like most everyone has responded and we will move on. We have one more poll that we would like to share with you as well. So we also wanted to know what you hope to achieve through your library's Instagram account and this might be for the account you currently have or the one that you hope to open after this webinar is over. So you can check as many of these responses as apply to your situation and once you have selected them click submit and you will be able to see everybody's responses. So we will see what the most popular responses are here. And of course our guests today will be telling us some of the reasons they have created an Instagram account and what they hope to achieve there. I will give you a few moments. I know it takes a moment to look through these. Some of these options relate to the way you might connect with your library users or share library information. Maybe you are looking to attract new library users and some of these are more general, just promoting books and reading, promoting libraries in general or connecting with community organizations and other libraries. We can definitely see some of these rising to the top. If you have other, of course you can type that in the chat. I see one response just came in just to get more teens involved with your library or to improve higher participation in your programs. Those are great reasons as well. So I will give just another few seconds here on this poll and give you a chance to submit your responses and I will close it down and take a look at this summary in 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. We have few last responses in here right at the end. So taking a look at these we can see that definitely promoting library services and programs, connecting with library users, and attracting new library users are the top three responses. And we also got almost 75% for staying current and relevant which is definitely something I think in the library community will want to do is stay current with technology and social media practices. So thank you for sharing your responses there. So it's great to see all of the interest today and the last thing I will say before handing things over to Amanda is that I just hope wherever you are at with Instagram and your library that you walk away with a few new ideas today to apply to your library's Instagram account. But now I am going to hand things over to Amanda so she can tell us about what they've been doing at the Cherry Hill Public Library. Amanda? Amanda-Hi everyone. So I wanted to start off and give you guys a little bit of information about Cherry Hill. We are a standalone library and we serve a very large community. Our population is about 70,000 and we are located about 20 minutes away from Philadelphia. First thing I want to share with you guys is how our library uses Instagram. And what we first did was set up a list of goals. Our goals are important because that gives us a blueprint for what we should be posting. So if you are looking to start an Instagram account it might be a good place to start to get an idea of the kind of things you want to post. From those goals our library has made a list of tasks and our library also has a social media committee. So it's not just me it's a team. And we focus on these six tasks but we are not limited to these six tasks. It's just a general representation of what we would like to post. One to two team members focuses on each of these tasks. And I will give more examples of these tasks in a couple of slides. So I see some people are asking what these mean and I'm going to show them in a minute. So there are eight people on the social media committee. And a way we manage it is by using a document through a Google drive. This is an example of the month of April how we set up our tasks. And one of the team members creates the document. She gives us ideas and notes and then we can put in whatever it is that we'd like to post if we have any ideas. So this is an example of Bookface which most people should be familiar with. If you are using Instagram or know about Instagram and libraries it's a popular trend on Instagram and very popular with libraries. So when we post Bookface pictures I feel that it not only represents the fun Instagram trends but it's also a way to celebrate libraries in general. So this is an example of DVDs and TV shows. We just took a picture of six DVDs that all recently came in. We actually just posted this picture the other day. And it's just a way to let our followers and patrons know these new releases just arrived like come check them out. So it's a way to promote our services and our programs. So this is a junior chef program which is very popular. This is a photo. Our youth services department, two members of the social media committee is on the committee and they do all the posts for all the youth services events. They try to represent all of our goals with their posts. And I think they do a pretty good job. This is a picture of some end pages. And I find that the end pages and book covers make fantastic pictures. There's a lot of beautiful book covers out there and just taking pictures of book covers is a great thing to have on your Instagram account. Let's move on to the next picture. These are pictures that we posted for upcoming events that we're having at our library. And the Cosplay logo actually was created by one of our part-time employees that posts these type of pictures. It's a good way to let your patrons know about programs and even people who possibly aren't patrons but live nearby when you post your events. And this is a great picture. I love this picture. It's actually one of our team members' cats. And it's a great representation of pop culture and Instagram trends. So we have the hashtag cats of Instagram and caturday because it was taken on a Saturday. So these are things that we like to post. We like to have fun and not have everything be about the library. We like to represent things that other people want to see. And I guess we just want to have pleasing pictures. So it's an adorable picture. So now I want to move on to the quality of pictures that you want to show and we want to show on Instagram. This is actually one of our photos. I'm not sure who took it or who posted it, but it's not a great photo. It's blurry and it's just not a great photo. Our director is the person on the right-hand side and she's a little bit caught off. But I do have an example of what you should be doing. So I borrowed this picture from Burlingame and this is a do. So this is a way to maybe do a blurry picture but it's blurry on purpose, the bottom part there. And I think it's a great representation of what you should be doing. But don't do what we did and post a picture like the one on the right. So now I'm going to talk a little bit more about Bookface. Bookface Friday, like I said, is very popular. And just some tips are it's okay if you are hands and fingers show. The Joker picture on top is one of our pictures. And I think that picture was mostly a huge success because we have an employee who has green hair. And when he dyed his hair green, I immediately thought of the Joker and said we have to get a picture, a Bookface picture with him. And the Danielle Steele picture is amazing. It's one of my favorite Burlingame pictures. Again, I used an example. They have some really great Bookface pictures. So take a look and learn from them. So it's okay if your fingers show. And I find that if you can line up at least one line, it helps to make the picture work for the Bookface. And as you can see with the Danielle Steele picture, they don't always need to be faces. And sometimes you are going to need props. So sometimes these things work quickly, but sometimes you need to gather some stuff to make the Bookface work. These are editing apps that I use on my phone. They are apps that I feel most people can use. The novice can use these apps and they will help them get better photos for Instagram. So it's a list of the apps and what they do. Each of them does something a little slightly different. And we don't use all of them all the time, but every once in a while you want a video or you want to add music. So they are apps that anybody can use and they are all free to download. We try for promotion of our posts. We try to use as many hashtags as possible. We like to tag the author if we use a picture of their book. In this one, we also tagged Fun Home the Musical, and they ended up liking our post. So it's always great to get recognition from either the author or someone who is involved with the book if it's a graphic novel, the illustrator maybe. But we always try to promote the book using the author or the celebrity. The celebrity writes a book and we use a picture of that. For promotion we also follow and support other libraries. And a great way to find libraries is just to search the Bookface Friday hashtag. Most libraries are doing bookface pictures and you can just search through and find great pictures and find great libraries that way. This last slide is a trend that I've noticed on Instagram. It is the Bookbento Instagram. There's actually an account called Bookbento. And if you don't know what a bento is, it's a traditional Japanese box for lunch. The picture is in the center of the bento. And I've just noticed that there's a trend of setting these pictures up in like a stylish and very particular manner that looks very nice. It's all coordinated and pleasing. And the bottom three, the one on the far right and left are Berlin Games pictures and the one in the center, the lead afford picture is ours. The top two came from at Bookbento. So it's a good thing to look for. And I think it's kind of like a fun new trend if you're interested in posting anything like that. And that's about all I have for today. We'll get to the questions. Yeah, Amanda, so thank you for sharing some of these great ideas. Now I think whether you already have an Instagram account for your library for those of you listening or you're starting this for the first time, this was a really nice outline of some of the different things you can do and the different types of things you can highlight that both promote your library and books and reading and all of those different causes and relating back to the goals, Amanda, that you shared with us at the beginning. So I think this is a really nice kind of overview of what the possibilities are. And Amanda, we've gotten a lot of questions already. And I know at this moment we have time to answer a few. We'll get to as many as we can right now. And then I'll invite everyone listening to continue to send questions in because we'll have more time at the end. But just a couple of questions for you Amanda. Now it looked like when we saw the schedule and that management organization sheet that you had that it seemed to be about one post per day. And so we have a couple of questions around that. First of all, is that kind of your target to do one post a day or how many do you try to post per day or per week? And do you know of any general recommendations for what's too much or too little in terms of number of posts? We tend to do one a day, but we don't always do one every day. So we'll maybe do like five to six a week, but it also depends on the week. So we try not to do too many. If we say we're going to post one and something else happens like last Thursday, I think we had a scheduled post, but then we posted something about prints instead. So if it can be posted later or at another time, we wait. But if we do do two posts a day, we try to do one in the morning and one in the afternoon and then maybe we'll do less during the week. So maybe that week we'll only do like four or five. But I think typically we do anywhere between four to six posts in a week. I know what Instagram is changing. I think they're going to have an algorithm and I'm not exactly sure how that's going to affect what people see. So I think we're trying to feel it out and see what's too much and what's not enough. Great. And I think we have time for just one more question right now, which is, and I think this is a really good question that was asked about posting pictures of patrons and especially I think this came up at the moment when you had the Youth Services slide up and you had the pictures of the kids up there as well. So how does your library handle permission for posting patron photos? Do you have a permission form or do you just ask for verbal permission? What do you do? They mostly do verbal permission. I did find out from one of our children's librarians that some of her regulars, she's just aware of whether or not they've already either signed the sheet because we do have a photo release sheet. But I think she is aware of who has signed that at this point. And she said if she's not sure, she will do a quick verbal agreement. She also said that some of her patrons that come to these programs, she knows that they have Instagram accounts, like even some of the kids and teens, they have their own Instagram account. So they're like, take a picture of me and they want it. So if they tell her that they want to be in the picture, then she will just go ahead and take the picture of them. Also, she said she likes to do some pictures in a way that may, I think in those pictures there is an example of, you can't quite see the entire face of the child. So she says she tends to do a lot of that as well when she is unsure whether or not that particular person has signed the release or if they would be uncomfortable with being posted. All right. Well thank you for sharing the way that you have handled that situation in your library. It sounds like there's a couple different ways that you've been addressing it and that you know your patrons pretty well as far as regular patrons go. So we have quite a few more questions, but I want to move on so we get to hear Ray's presentation as well. So Amanda, I'll say thank you right now. We'll bring you back on later for more questions. Okay. All right. And those of you who have asked questions know that we will continue to respond to those later on and we'll also follow up via email with any of those we aren't able to get to them during our live webinar today. But now I'd like to turn over the controls to Ray so that he can share some of the good practices from the Berlin Game Public Library's Instagram account. So Ray? Hello everybody. I just want to say thank you for spending the time and joining us in this webinar. My name is Ray DeLar and I work for the Berlin Public Library. We're a small library in the Bay Area. We serve a population of 37,000 people and we have about a staff of 63 people. And we also have a small branch called the Eastern Branch Library. I want to start first with some quick pointers about getting started with the Instagram account. First you want to pick a clearing concise username. You also want to create a strong description for your account and our description is listed there on the screenshot. Books, places, people, and things, the stuff we love. Another part of your profile will be a link. And we typically like to rotate out our links. Sometimes it's our link to our Facebook page. Sometimes the link to our library website. Sometimes it's links to, for example, this webinar was up there for people to register. And in the screenshot we have a link to one of our cool new projects that my co-worker is doing, a podcast project called NeUE. And of course, when you start your account, you want to have a game plan. And when we first started our account, it was simply our goal was to increase our presence on social media. And after running the account for almost two years now, we kind of fine-tuned our approach. But having these questions addressed when we first started would have helped us out very much in the beginning. And that is, to answer these questions, who is your intended audience? Are you going to reach out to the patrons that already use your library? Are you trying to reach out to those patrons or to those people who may not yet use your patrons? Or are you just sharing the fun things about your library with other libraries on social media? The next question is, what kind of content do you plan to share? Are you going to share pictures of events? Are you going to share new additions to your various collections? Are you going to share video? I'm going to go a little bit more into content creation a little bit later in the presentation. And finally, the question is, how do you manage your account? I know Amanda mentioned that Cherry Hill has a social media team and we also have a social media team here at the Brolinian Library. We run a little bit differently. We have people designated for each social media outlet. I'm in charge of Instagram. We have other people in charge of our Twitter accounts, of our Facebook account, YouTube channel, and also our Pinterest account. And we meet once a month to kind of coordinate our efforts. And we actually started doing an editorial calendar so we could all kind of know what everybody's posting so we kind of avoid reposting the same things. So what do you do when you have this new cool account on Instagram? Well, you got to market it. And this is some of the ways that we marketed our account when we first started. We announced the account on email, newsletters, all of our program flyers, our website. We made social media bookmarks that we put in people's holds. When they picked them up, they had these social media bookmarks. We left them on all the desks. We passed them out at author events. And we put all of our social media badges on our email signatures, too. Of course, we used all of our other social media accounts to announce that we're starting an Instagram. We also, in the very beginning, linked most of our IG posts to Facebook. So then we would be posting on both outlets at the same time. And there's also that level of just word of mouth. We told our friends. We told our family. We told our coworkers to follow. And of course, we followed other libraries. And Amanda mentioned searching the book face Friday tag to find other libraries. Another tip that we used when we were trying to find other libraries is we just looked at what other libraries, looked at what other libraries, who other libraries were following. And you could simply just click on somebody's followers account and it will list everybody that they follow. And more often than not, a whole bunch of other libraries as well. So that's another good way to find other libraries on Instagram. And of course, a big priority for us here in Brolin Game now is to engage our community to tell them that we have this account. We're using this account to share the events and the special moments that happen within our library. And the way to do that is search hashtags and start your own hashtag campaigns. And of course, to get out of the library, get into the community, post pictures outside of the library, basically getting outside of the walls to really find people. This next slide has a couple of screenshots here. And this is, these all relate to searching the hashtags on Instagram. And Instagram now, you weren't able to search hashtags through their web based version, but now you can. So it's pretty cool. So that first one is just our location. And I just looked that up and I took a screenshot and it shows us the pictures that people have posted. Actually none of these pictures are actually ours. These are all from our patrons. And they just used the Brolin Game library location when they posted their account. And then I went in there, they liked it and I commented. And those likes in the comments people see and then they know that the library has an account. So it's a great way to reach out to those people who are using Instagram and using Instagram right in your library. I also searched the hashtag just Brolin Game Library. Most of those pictures now are from us, but when we first started the account, most of those pictures were from users that didn't even know that we had an account. So basically, I just went back and I liked all those pictures. And then again, those people then some of them followed us. And then I just searched the hashtag Brolin Game as well. A lot of pictures show up and it's also a good tool for you starting an Instagram account is that when you look at your location and hashtags, you kind of see the places where the community is and what they're posting. You could also post and go to those same places and take photos and also like all them and comment. And then also search the popular areas in your city. That last screenshot is the Brolin Game Avenue hashtag and again, it's a good way to engage your community. I mentioned something about creating your own hashtags to engage and this is an example of one that we did two Halloween ago. We had a theme of Brolin Game of Thrones and we actually built a throne out of books and we placed it on the lobby with a sign saying take a picture sitting on the throne of books and tag us on Instagram and use the hashtag Brolin Game of Thrones. And this is really a way for us to find out who in our community and who of our patrons are actually on Instagram. And to our surprise, people started posting and the three photos aren't our photos at all. Those are from patrons and it's just a good tool that helps us really see that there are people out using our library and who are on Instagram at the same time. Another create your own hashtag campaign was last summer we did a called the 100 Day Project and actually it was just an overall Instagram challenge meant for people to post something created whether it was a drawing or a video for 100 Day Street and make that commitment. And we attempted it. We actually went and got through all 100 days and it was our pin though was that for each post we would post something that had to do about the City of Brolin Game. So it was a great way to reach out to those people to find our account as an informative avenue about their own city. And it was another great way to connect with local businesses, connect with the Brolin Game Historical Society and other community organizations. Again, another great way to build staff support for their account because 100 pictures for 100 Day Street was a lot to handle for just one person. So I sent a call out to all my coworkers and my staff to see if they had anything interesting that I should highlight during this project or if they could take pictures if they had any ideas. And we really just pulled all these pictures together and we got this project done. We got a lot of great feedback from our community as well. Amanda talked about hashtags. I'm going to go into some of the hashtags real briefly. You want to participate in library hashtag campaigns and Instagram challenges and I'll go into what's more specific about that later. And there's a list of some hashtags here that I tend to use on most of our posts. Again, the hashtags I think are important. You don't want to go overboard but we are putting this content out to be shared and when you add another hashtag it's putting your picture in a pool of photos that you never know if you'll gain somebody's interest. So I would think that it's a great idea to use hashtags for your images. An example of a great library hashtag is Bookface Friday and 13,000, almost 14,000 posts. It's been pretty amazing. Libraries all over the world are participating and it simply takes a book and a staff member willing to pose but it's a great way to get your name out if you're just starting or to create content if you already have an account. This is a great example of a library using a hashtag and putting a library spin on it. The Bernardville Public Library created this library hashtag. It's called Library in My Hand and it's a very captivating image. It shows somebody holding their phone but having some sort of library service displayed on there and it was a great way to promote the remote services that are available to patrons when they're not even in the library and libraries all over again joined in and participated. It was a great example and I wanted to highlight this example during this presentation of a way that libraries have been using Instagram to promote services, not even just services that happen inside the building but from home just simply through your device. I talked a little bit about reaching out to your local community but also there's a second part to it is that there's a community on Instagram and from my experience what I kind of did is I just dived right into it. I followed all the library accounts. I liked a lot of pictures, commented and also I followed Instagram's actual account and by doing so Instagram will post images that you kind of want to replicate their beautiful photos but on top of that what they'll also do is they'll highlight other accounts and looking at other people's accounts also has provided an inspiration for me to also get ideas of what to post to the library, putting a library spin on things. So highly suggest to follow Instagram and if you have the chance to connect with other Instagramers we were lucky to be invited not too long ago. A couple of weekends ago to San Francisco Public Library for InstaMeet where we got to meet other Instagramers and we got a special tour of the main library down there behind the scenes before the library opened and it was a great event and so I encourage if you have the opportunity to host an InstaMeet at your library or attend one, do so. It was an awesome event and I was very honored to have been invited and collaborate with your fellow libraries on Instagram. We're all in this together. We're all showing, trying to show that libraries are changing today and we're developing new ways and we're accepting new ways of reaching our community and just being on Instagram is a testament to that. So we're together with other libraries on Instagram. Last year we did the library Donut Shelfie where I reached out to the libraries on Instagram to send me Donut Shelfies and it's kind of hard to explain with text that's on our YouTube channel but we had about 18 libraries submit to us these Donut Shelfies and it created this one big selfie and it got everyone involved and it was a fun project. So collaborate, reach out to your fellow libraries in your system or just in general and work on projects together. Now a little bit on content creation, all you really need is your smart phone. Here's a little image of what we have so far in terms of what we use as camera, GoPro, some tripod and when it gets petty then we definitely use a laptop to do some further editing. This is Crystal. I'm just going to jump in here. Just out of time what I might suggest is if we jump ahead because you've got and we'll let everybody know all these slides will be available about the content creation and I know you've got some slides in here that talk about the video and stop motion video and some great tips in there. But I think it might be good if we jump ahead to hearing about some of your challenges and successes maybe just a little bit on the analytics if you want to jump there and then that way we have time for a few more questions before we wrap up. Good, sounds good. Okay, so let's just jump to the challenges and one thing that helped us out is that the city developed a social media policy and that applied to content that we created and also the comments and followers and who to follow. So double check with your city or your library to find out if you have a social media policy and that will help you out in launching your account. Again, getting the word out to your community and I touched on some of the things that we did and of course keeping content fresh. You don't want to overload all your social media outlets with the same thing so it does take some coordination between your team and finding the time to just make the content and managing the account has been a challenge. But even with all these challenges there has been some success with our account and just real brief we were lucky to be on the list of the top 10 best related books and the best book related Instagram accounts. We were also featured last year in the New York Times for some of our book faces and we were also recognized at ALA for our book faces as a way to promote collections and I mentioned participating in Instagram challenges. Last Halloween we were selected as a winner for Instagram's weekend hashtag project and it was a very exciting thing to have been featured by Instagram themselves. So just to take away points and just dive into the Instagram community. Comment, follow and like other library photos, even other Instagramers, people in your community really get involved. Be passionate. Although I managed the account, the account would not be here because it was not for my coworkers and they're willing to pose for a book face or they're willing to help out with shooting a video. So definitely you want to utilize your coworkers and your library. And of course have fun because it will translate into your account and people will see it and hopefully they will follow. And that's pretty much it. All right. And Ray, I know you've got these links here and these we are including in the archive. There's some really great ideas here and also some conversation about video on Instagram from the Instagram Help Files. So we'll include those in the archive as well. And just to reiterate, we do have all of the slides and there are some really great tips included to encourage you to go back through those. But we want to take just a few more minutes for some of the questions that have been coming in especially as they pertain to what you've been sharing so far. And Ray, I know you talked a little bit more about the hashtags. And we've had quite a few questions about how to use the hashtags. And one was, do you have any advice on getting people to participate in the library hashtags? I know you had a few examples you shared, but was there anything specific you did to promote the hashtag itself or did it just kind of catch on? Well with the Brolin Game and Thrones example, we simply just left a sign there right next to the throne of books to kind of inform people that we are on social media and to use the hashtag. We have been doing these little projects like that scavenger hunt and then it shows some of those photos. And whenever we do programs or something like that, we'd like to try to create our own specific hashtags so then people who participate can search it and find it as well. Great. And another question came in, is there such thing as too many hashtags? I know sometimes we see people use many, many hashtags. So do you have a certain number that you shoot for when you're creating a post or a point where you think it might be too many for a library account? I think no. I mean there's a point where it could be way too many hashtags. But I think for us we tend to use always kind of the same ones. Right now we're using like a set of maybe five or six that are applied to each post. Libraries Transform, Libraries of Instagram, Library Life, Libraries and then Brolin Game and then Brolin Game Library. And those are kind of our consistent hashtags. And then of course the other ones that we add on are dependent on what we're posting. Right. And then do you have any tips for identifying pop culture trends that you might tack on to or things in your community? Finding those or discovering them? Again a lot of it is following other community organizations on Instagram and also searching the local hashtags. And also the Explore page on Instagram is a good way to find just general pop culture trends because just like Twitter they'll highlight the hashtags that are trending so to speak. So the Explore page is a great place to find those kind of trends. So we did have some questions kind of in between your presentation and Amanda. So Amanda I'll have you come on now and maybe answer this one as well. And one that I think is really important for us to consider in public libraries especially is dealing with inappropriate comments. So I'd like to ask each of you, Amanda I'll have you go first on this one. Have you had any inappropriate comments come in? How have you handled those in your library? Whether it was somebody who was just being negative or seemed to be kind of a spammer or an Instagram trolling type of person. Have you handled that? I don't think we've actually had a problem with that on Instagram. We have had a couple problems on Facebook. When they came in they were handled pretty much directly by our director. And she addressed it, answered their question, and then blocked them so that they could not post anything else negative when it came to the point where it was just obvious that they were just being negative to be negative. Right. And it sounds like you got second opinion from administration or manager so that's always good to do. Ray what about on your end? Have you had any issues with inappropriate comments? Yes we have. And that's why on the challenges I wrote down that social media policy. So the city and the library has adopted any social media policy and that applies to comments. So off the top of my head I don't know the exact wording. Basically if it's a dig at a coworker or just inappropriate, we delete it straight out. And if it continues to happen then we block the user. All right. And I know one of the people who asked that question said that they had very strict policies for not deleting comments. So maybe that's where taking a look at updating policies especially around social media might be something to consider in your library if that's an issue that you're facing. And so that is a good thing to consider. Well we're just about out of time. And I suppose that what I want to just reiterate for everybody who has questions we haven't responded to. I know we had a lot of very technical questions and also some that we just simply didn't have time for. We will get back to you all via email with those. And also again we'll have all of those resources and links available to you. I did just want to end with one last question for each of you though. And this came early on. And I know you shared a lot of different examples of what types of content you are sharing. But what are you finding gets the most engagement from your users, from your followers, the most shares, the most followers, and the most views. So Amanda again I'll have you go first. What seems to be the biggest success for you guys with your Instagram? Actually not sure. I feel like it varies. I think a lot of times it's just what happens to be the best picture. And it might also depend on what time we post it. I think that it really depends. I don't think there's a one set thing for us that gets better. I know you talked a lot about the quality photos so that definitely seems to be an emphasis for you in something that's working well at Cherry Hill. Ray what about you? What seems to be the most popular content out there for your Instagram account? I would say of course number one is the bookface Friday post for sure. I think it's just such a wildly popular hashtag that not only are people seeing it in their feeds but people are just clicking on the hashtag. They might not even be following us and they see our photos. So the popularity of that hashtag has led those kind of posts to be the most popular on our account. Second to that I would think would be some of the stop-motion videos that we do to either promote events or to highlight new books. Other than that pictures of our community I think are probably the next highest on that and that's the goal that we have going forward is to kind of share more pictures of the people that come into the library. Great. And I agree those bookface Fridays sure are fun and get people's attention. So that sounds like maybe a good place to start if you're not doing that or if your library is starting with Instagram that could be a really great avenue for you to start on. So Amanda and Ray thank you so much for sharing. We will get back to you with those unanswered questions via email and we'll be sending out that archive later on this week. Please do stay on the line. I have just a few announcements that you might be interested in and we'll ask you to take a brief survey at the very end. But I just wanted to remind you again about that Storymakers 2016 campaign and the prizes that you can win there. Submissions can be sent in through May 31 and there are a few webinars still coming up on polishing your digital story and using photos specifically to tell your story. So you might be interested there. Also we have a few upcoming library webinars, one on outcome measurement for small libraries next Wednesday May 4 and one on May 18 on teaching digital skills to older adults in libraries. So that's all that we have for you today. I just want to thank ReadyTalk for being our sponsor and thanks again to Ray and Amanda for sharing their Instagram expertise and thank you to you for joining us. So have a great afternoon everybody. Thanks. Bye-bye.