 Oh, welcome back everybody. It is the top of the hour. It is 11 a.m. central time here in Lincoln, Nebraska. And it is time for our next presenters. Session number three here at 11 o'clock. Making the most of Facebook and blogging. How to use social media effective in a small library. We have Penn Wilson, a librarian at Dorothy Pike Memorial Library and Miranda Brumbau, also a librarian at the Platt Public Library both in South Dakota. So ladies, I will let you go ahead and take it away. Okay, my name is Pam and as I was thinking that this was a really good talk for us because our population in the late present is 599, so we're pretty small. It is important, I believe, to be up in the times with technology, so people will see that we aren't dinosaurs. We're actually really up on things. So one of the best ways I think do that is to have a Facebook page where you can share with your patrons what you have coming into your library. The first page that we have here, this is the administration panel, which looks a little bit different than probably what you're used to with having a personal Facebook page. You're able to see notifications, how many people are viewing your pages. And one important thing, you have to have 30 likes on a professional page in order to get that information, which is in the end sites that you can see in the middle of the screen there. It's really good information to have so you can keep track of how many people you are reaching. This page, this is what I like to do with my pages, take pictures from online and put them on your Facebook page to show what books you have coming in. You can also take pictures of events that have happened at the library. You can see on the next page too, on the bottom left you can see something that says organic and viral. The organic means it's the people that like your page that have seen your post. The viral is actually people that have seen the post through your friends. So if you say you have 30 likes, you can be reaching hundreds of people in all actuality. This is a breakdown of the chart that can show you age groups of people that are coming to your page, gender. So I guess you can tell by us we have a lot of females in the 35 to 44 range and then 55 to 64, that's mostly what our patrons seem to be. You can also view the states, as you can see there's a couple from Nebraska that have viewed our page through some of our friends that like our page. And it's kind of important information so that you can see if maybe there are certain age groups that you need to do a little bit more to reach out to. And this page is a little bit more of a broken down of the chart you just saw. You can see on the reach how many people we have reached on each post, age users or people that have shared your post. The virality percentage there you see is what percentage of your post was able to be seen by other people than your friends that like the page. Let's see on the next page might be the last one. And I'm not sure if I'm able to bring up my page to show you a little bit more entailed. Do you want me to? I'm not sure how we can switch that. Do you want me, well I can't open your Facebook, do you want me to go back to the first slide Pam? We could try that, I was hoping I could show a live version of my Facebook page but we might not be able to do that. Pam I can give control to you. Would the presenters be able to switch? Okay that would be great. Okay we'll switch here. Okay we're seeing your screen panel? There we go. It's everybody you see. Oh great it's up. Good thing here too you can see that the administration panel that I was talking about where you get your notifications, you have your index page. But one thing I really want to show is down here you have these little tabs where you can click them and it will take your patrons to different places. I did add thanks to Jane at the state here in South Dakota, South Dakota titles go for overdrive. When you click that it takes your patrons to your South Dakota title page. It might not be working for me. When one of your patrons hits that tab it takes much of the overdrive link. Which is kind of handy that way you know they can just go to your Facebook page and I know they can go there. Pam I think there's a button at the bottom of your screen label to show all content. I think if you click that that would make that screen work. Let's see. That's not what this should look like. And there's also something that I did mention you can highlight. I'll remove the highlight so you can see that this strength so that it's smaller so that's something you really want to draw attention to. You can highlight it and it will show up bigger on your page. Here's an example here where you can see that this post had 27 people that saw it. When you run your cursor over that it will bring up an explanation. And then viral will show you the number of people that saw your post from a friend that likes your page. We also carry DVDs so I do update the page with DVDs so that people realize that we have more to offer than just books. And also like audio books we got audio books in. So it's really fun to have this because you can keep people updated and just let them know that you are not a dinosaur library. You are technology. I'd like to show a little bit better the insights page. This will show you percentages per week on what you're reaching. Like we have now we have 41 total likes. Friends of fans is 6,734. So you can see that you can have a wider reach than just those 41 people that like your page. So we've reached, you know, our reach has gone up, which is always good to see. And also I wanted to say that for setting up your professional Facebook page, just in case anyone has any questions on how to do that, you would go to Facebook and you would hit up Create a Page. And you want to select a page for a business. And once you select that drop down column, and there will be a library listed so that you can select that and it kind of helps you to set up a recording being a library, which is really helpful. And I'm not sure anyone has any questions. Yeah, looks like we got some questions coming in from the audience. Okay, one question is how do you get people to like your page? How are you getting people to come there? What we first did, we had a lot of our library board, my fan members, friends that would like a page in order to get us up to that 30. And once you do that, you know, friends of theirs start to see your page and they start to add you as well. So it didn't take long. It took us maybe about a month to get up to those 30 likes. It was a little frustrating because we want to get to that so that you can have that chart. We can see how many people you're reaching in the age groups and the genders. But yeah, just have your family, your friends like the page. Okay, have you noticed any increased library activity due to having the Facebook page? We definitely have. A lot of people have overdrive through our library where they can get e-books through the state. That's one of the handy things with having that link on the website or on the Facebook. People can just go to your Facebook page and then they get to it through there. But, you know, we have a lot of people that aren't really used to e-books and how do you use them? So I've had people coming in saying, oh, we didn't realize that we could get e-books through the library. So it was kind of good to get that information out there as well that we can help them with their e-readers. One suggestion for getting people to like your page and beyond that I have here, too, is that board members and council members, you should make sure that they like your Facebook page. If they're on Facebook, get them on there right away. Correct. Yes, that's really good because they are able to see what I'm doing because I am the only librarian. There is no other staff at our libraries to want it. So they kind of, you know, they can keep an eye on me. Luckily, they like what I'm doing. So it's good for them to be on it as well so they can see that, you know, we're reaching people. We're staying at the time so people are really enjoying having it. We've had people come in once they've seen that we have a book on our Facebook page that we have that book in stock and they come in and they check it out. And I did have a craft day back in October for the kids for Halloween and I had posted it on Facebook and we had quite a few children come through just because they saw it on their Facebook page, the parents, and they brought the kids in. So it's really a good way to communicate with your community members and let them know what you're up to. Yeah, we have actually quite a few comments here on ways to increase the Facebook views. Some people have said you can get, Facebook has very cheap options for promoting pages now for $10 or $20 people have put out ads and gotten $50 or $20 new links right away from using that. Yes. Right there it says get more likes. Yep, exactly. It doesn't cost much and it gets a good return. Yes, definitely. Oh, who did you have to approach to approve getting a Facebook page for the library? Did you have to go through any sort of process to persuade someone in authority to let this happen? I did talk to the board members before I did anything because I felt I'm pretty young and I'm really into technology and I thought it was really important, especially with a small town library, to be able to have a Facebook page to reach people, especially teenagers. They're all about Facebook now and that's one area that we really need help in. We need to build our team readers coming into the library. It didn't take too much coaching. We do have a couple of older members on the board, which they don't know too much about computers, but luckily they trusted me and they told me pretty much to go for it. Okay. There's a technical question. How did you get that overdrive tab up there on the Facebook page? That I got through, Jane, who is in the South Dakota State Library, she sent me information on how to get that link. I have to talk to your libraries on how to do that, enable to get that South Dakota titles to go tab to look like that. Pretty much what you go, you add one of these plus points here and you can go to find more apps. It's actually an app and you have to have information or to that and you would do like a search all apps to be able to find it. I don't know if it'll come up or not because I had a direct link to that one. Yeah, and actually a couple of people are saying that Overdrive actually has information on their own website about how to get that into your page. Yeah, it was pretty simple. It took me maybe three minutes to get up there. We're sorting through the questions here. A lot are coming in. Okay. What about negative comments or people using bad language? How do you deal with that? Luckily, we have not had that, but being that you're the person that set up the page, you have this administrative powers where you can delete them. So if you had the post that you didn't like, you can go up here. Yeah, you could delete the post. So it's something like that. And you saw it, you could get rid of it quickly. But you have full control over whatever is on your page. If there's someone that is being rowdy, you don't want them on, you can ban them from your page so they're not allowed to come back. That is true. Yeah, that helps a lot. Okay, someone who is not very computer savvy. What about people who are not computer savvy? Is it easy to get those books on the Facebook like what you were doing there? How difficult was that? It is. What I've done, can I bring up another page? Would that be okay? Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. What I like to do to find pictures of books, you would go to Google search and let's just say Percy Jackson comes to mind for me. You enter it and then you would go to images and get this picture here. You would click it, right click it and put save image as. Mine is being a little slow. Okay, and then you would just like, you could enter like Percy and save. And it is saved now to your computer. So say you would go up here and put photo video, add photo video, and then you would browse to find the picture that you just saved and then you could do a question like I have here on this one of the Send Wonders book. So Google is pretty handy because you can find books, DVD, pictures, pretty much anything like that that you could join your web page. Okay, great. That was a good demo of showing how to do that. Do you have something on your page, some sort of info asking people to keep on subject, is it too fantastic about the library and not comment to you about other city problems or agencies or issues? Or how do you have any problem with that? What do you mean again? So trying to keep people who are commenting and chatting on your page on topic to just talk about the library rather than about any other city problems or issues or agencies. Yeah, we really haven't had anything come up where they've posted anything about city problems. I don't even know if the city has a Facebook page to be honest. They do have a web page, but so far we haven't had anyone coming on and saying anything about anything besides the library. We do have a couple of questions actually going back to putting those book covers up. We want to, are there any copyright issues with taking them off of the internet doing that? And someone else actually suggests is when they do it, they put a little copyright caution there. Do you have any, are there any issues with that? I haven't had any issues come up. We aren't using the pictures to sell anything. We're just promoting that we have the book. I know copyright sometimes it's a little finicky situation there. But I've been to other Facebook pages where they have pictures and I haven't seen any problems there either with using pictures like these. I'll throw in here. This is Michael at the Library Commission. If you're sticking to the covers of the books, you're probably pretty much okay. There is a thing in copyright law about what are called creating useful works. And in essence, you are kind of marketing the stuff you have. If you're super, super mega concerned about pulling it off of Google, take a photo of it with your camera phone or something and post that instead of the actual physical item you own and then you'll be you're completely 100% bulletproof there at that point. Yeah. And I've never taken anything like where it's got excerpts from inside the book or anything like that. It's always just the cover. Okay, a technical question, I guess, is are the comments that people put up posted immediately or do they go through an administrator or someone to approve them first? They actually come up immediately. Yeah. I don't think Facebook does that. You do get a notification. Once someone is posted, you do get a notification here. You would click that and you'll see that someone came up and either liked something or posted a comment. Yeah. Facebook doesn't work that way that you approve comments and things like you might do on your blog or something like that. It's automatic, but you can see what comes up. And like you said, you're notified. So if there's something that you don't like or something that you need to be editing, taking down for whatever reason, you can then go and get it off there. Yeah. Michael's raising his hand. Correct. Yeah. Well, Ann, I just, I'm watching the Twitter feed here and Robin Hastings has, if you search Twitter for our hashtag, BTSL, she has posted the link to the overdrive instructions for getting a linking to your overdrive account through your Facebook account. So that is available. We'll put it in the show notes too. But if you're on Twitter, you can find those there. Thank you, Robin. Yeah. Oh, and another suggestion about putting those books in there is, and I talk about this too when you're talking about it, some OPACs do include the feature, and it's something that's been purchased along with it, of including book covers. And this one library provides links to their own catalog record from Facebook. That's where it goes to when you go to that feature. And they pull the book covers from their OPAC where they've gotten them from officially in a problem. Sure. So that is a way to do it as well. There's only one more question about the Facebook at the moment. Feel free to type in any more if you have them. I've caught up finally. I'm not sure if this is a question you can answer or we can at all. Someone says they've not been able to get a unique URL for their Facebook page without having a cell phone number. Is there any way around that? I don't think so. I don't think my cell phone number is in Facebook. Mine isn't. Mine, they didn't ask me for it and I didn't give it to them. I'm hesitating here because I know how it works on YouTube, which I realize is not Facebook. But I know in YouTube there's a verification system where if you give yourself a number, they'll send you a text message. And then with a code in it, you have to type the code back in to verify that you are you. That seems to be what someone is describing. I was not aware of that in Facebook for me. No, I'm not really sure. I don't really understand what that is that has happened in there. I've created multiple Facebook pages and they haven't. Someone says that's what Facebook is going to be doing. So maybe it's something new. I don't know. I have to try and create a page. Yeah. Last time I created a page was only like in January. I don't know then if it's something new like here in the south. He says it's what Facebook is going to do, start doing. Sorry. We don't know much about that yet if it's something new coming. Right. And again, just thinking about how other systems do that. Now, whether or not you want to give Facebook your cell phone number, that's probably issue number one. Issue number two, I would say is I would assume Facebook would only use that for the verification process. It's not going to necessarily list it like your personal cell phone number on your library's page. And then you can probably remove it after you've done the verification. But we are kind of talking some vaguely educated speculation at the moment. So sorry, we don't have a specific answer for you on that one. Yeah. I was going to say this is the address right here for my page and this is what we use even at the state. They have a link right to my Facebook page and it gets from right there. Okay. Yeah. So you have a custom URL. Yeah. And I know I can tell you the way it has worked previously when I created Facebook pages of the last few years is you create a page. This is the old way. Create a page and it would be Facebook.com, forward slash a bunch of random numbers. Then if you got up to 25 people to like your page, they would then say, okay, cool. Enough people like you now you can actually make it specific to be like so-and-so public library. That did change because recently I did pages. I was able to just create it automatically asked you for what do you want to call it. But then it adds numbers after that too. So they're kind of working towards, of course, when you start off having a page, you want to have it called something logical like Facebook.com forward slash main street public library. And then it would be a bunch of random numbers after that still. And I'm not sure how that then clears out now. But maybe they're switching to something new. I don't know. Facebook is changing things. Everything up there. All right. So let's see what we got here now. Oh, someone has another suggestion for promoting that they use billboards to promote their Facebook page. And from the understand it's not very expensive. I have no idea. But cool idea. Okay. This is a question. I don't think it's a question that any of you guys would be able to answer. I'm not sure if we can. Someone has a personal page for their, a personal page for the library. I want to switch it to a business page. I don't think you can switch it. You'd have to create a new just page for the, for the library itself. You can't, if you buy, originally made it as if you were a person and made it for the library, you can't just say, okay, I want to change it. You've made it incorrectly. Unfortunately, in the first place, you're just going to make a new one and then gradually tell people on your first page, sorry, we're now actually made this page instead and start sending them over there. Yeah. From my experience, that's what would happen. You have to make it, set it up right from the start as a business one. Okay. I just got, okay. The new way I described about getting a specific URL that now lets you put it in and then adds numbers afterwards, someone did the same thing. Once they got 30 likes, it took off those extra numbers and now their URL is just like the library that you see here. So if they, you're able to take it right away. But until they know that you're really, I guess enough to like you, you still end up having to put in a little extra. But eventually you'll be able to take that off of the URL. You get to say it, share it to people, and make it a much nicer, cleaner thing that goes out there. Oh, there's things coming in. Oh, does making a Facebook page cost anything? No, no, no. Facebook is free. Facebook is totally free service. You do not have to pay anything to create a page to do it in your time costs. So you do not have to pay anything. The only cost thing we were talking about earlier was that they do offer a service to create an ad that will help promote your page a little more and get more people to know about it. That's an extra thing voluntarily if you want to do that. But they're not paying at all. You do not have to pay to promote posts or anything. All of these things are optional ways of getting more activity on your page. There is nothing that you have to pay to use Facebook and to do anything. Well, have either of you considered using the pay for advertising service? For our library, we don't have an advertising budget. So it's not an option. It's not an option for us. But bigger libraries with bigger budgets, they probably could definitely benefit by that. Okay. And I'm going to, well, Chris is looking through it. I have one other question, kind of maybe a bigger picture question. In both of your libraries, is this the online presence? Did you have separate websites? Other things, or is this pretty much your focus? This is where you are online. Well, before I got there, we had nothing really. There was one page that was not updated, and I tried to get access to it. But for some reason or another, Facebook would not let me. I tried to prove who I was, but they needed more information than I had. So I started this one. I pretty much didn't have anything. I'm getting a lot of great feedback back from the community saying that they really like what I'm doing. They're able to see what we have. I updated, oh, at least a couple of times a week, at least. And it really is. It's helping with reaching more people, getting more people into the library, letting them know, too, that we know about e-books and how to get them situated when they get one for Christmas. They don't know what to do with it, and they bring it in, and we can help them with that. So it's good for them to see that we know about technology well. Oh, here's an interesting question. And this is, I think, more of a subjective answer. How much updating is too much? Well, you don't want to go and update and put, you know, things that aren't very relevant or just to be putting content in. It's got to be something that would be of interest to your patrons. I average probably maybe two to three posts a day, and I try to stab them a little bit. But you don't want to, like here, I wasn't going to go and put, oh, Time Magazine came in and they do another posting, Entertainment Weekly came in, and then another posting, Sports Illustrated came in. I combined it all into one post. So, you know, you don't want to have overkill, definitely. Okay, and do you have multiple Facebook admins, multiple people that are able to access your page? Right now I'm the only one. If there was ever something where one of the board members would like to help with the page, right now they haven't shown any interest, but you can add someone. They have to like your page first, but then you can add them as an administrator and they would have the same abilities as you would have on editing and adding information to the site. So, okay, it looks like we've pretty much reached the end of Facebook questions. And please, you know, continue to send those in. Did you have something on blogging also you wanted to talk about? Yes, that will be me. Okay, switch you back. Okay. All right, you're all set. Okay, hello, and thank you for joining this presentation. First of all, 79% of Americans regularly use the Internet, and there are more than 31 million bloggers in the United States. Blogging is a form of social media that includes Facebook page, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. That depends on the social engagement of Internet users through comments, guest posting, and re-blogging. So what is a blog? Here we have a definition of blog that states it's a website that contains online personal... Let me get this out of the way. That is an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer. Well, how does this relate to your library? Okay, let's see. Here is a screenshot of the blog we have at our library. Our library started the blog in August of 2012, and so far we've had 585 viewers. The goal of our blogging is to promote our library through the Internet and to connect with potential patrons and those who, for whatever reason, such as disability or distance, can't come into the library to keep up with us. We want the blog to eventually also become a source of community information. So what are we posting on our blog? We are currently posting about information about new books that come into our library, just like Pam has on our Facebook page. And we also include news about library programs, including our book club and Storytime. We plan to include more information about community events, and we would like to start posting interviews with local people and articles about community organizations and local businesses as a way to make our blog more of that community resource and to expand our reach as a library from a reading room to a community partnership. Here is one of the pages on our blog that includes a history about our library and contact information, including the email and the opening hours and times for our library and who the director is. And we also have a link to the overdrive program here at the bottom you can see that and also information about how to get signed up for the overdrive program with our library. And then at the bottom of this we have hyperlinks to all of the state library databases. So our patrons can come on here and they can go through there and quickly find the database that would be interesting to them, and they all of the links work. I checked in yesterday to make sure. Another page here from our this is more of the blog post page that people see when they first log into the website. On the left hand screen of the screen at the bottom you'll see the Facebook link. Our Facebook page at the library is also linked to our blog page. So whenever we post a blog post it automatically is published on our Facebook page to cross publish that. And above that we have a follow button. Users can go there and click on the follow button and enter their email and then they'll receive an email notification each time we post a blog. And then on the right hand side is the blog role which lists all of the most recent blog posts that we have so sort of an easy access there. Here is another post that we have done is a story time with photos. And images of books as Pam mentioned and videos will earn you more visitors than just posting words. After all pictures say a thousand words. When we do post pictures like this it automatically goes to our Facebook page and then the parents of the children are all friends of our Facebook page and they can go on and share the photos with their friends and family so that's turned out really well. And then here is a post talking about our book club and about a book. We always include the image of the book. Just as Pam mentioned we go to Google search for the images to find the clean clear book covers to post on there. And then we also have posted YouTube videos for how to use the overdrive program. We have had a lot of patrons that are interested in setting up their e-readers but they've had issues with getting started because there's so many different devices out there that you can make to get started with that. So we found several different videos for several different e-readers that patrons can go on and actually watch and action how to get started. Okay so building a blog. If you are interested in building a blog for your library here is how we got started. First we chose a blog host. Here are several of the most popular ones. We chose to go with WordPress for ours. You can pay to start a blog just like a Facebook page. It doesn't cost anything other than your time of course. You can pay to upgrade your blog so that you can get more advanced templates and images and things to add to your blog but it's not necessary. And you can also opt to purchase your domain name. As you can see from the very second to slide there our domain name is platpubliclibrary.wordgress.com If we paid the fee every year to purchase the domain name it would just become platpubliclibrary.com which is not something we've chosen to do yet but it would be an option. And through WordPress here is the behind the scenes of our blog it's called your dashboard. This is where all of the magic happens. This is where everything on the left hand side you can see where your post that would be where you add a new post to your blog. You can also screen all of the comments which is very important. I don't know if you can read there but we've had 231 spam comments already in 7 months. A lot of spammers go on and try to hyperlink to your blog and sale things sale random things that have nothing to do with your blog and it's very techy. So you can go on there as the administrator and block those and make sure that doesn't get put on your blog and you can screen all comments before they're posted too which is what we do. We approve everything before it's posted on there and you can also see the statistics of your blog which you can see right now we've posted 58 posts yet. So better blogging practices. Here are some tips we've learned through working with our blog and the best time to post your blog is between Tuesday and Friday from 10 to 2 because that is statistically when the most people are on the web looking at blogs and if you want to get yours in the reader so that people are going to see it in real time that's the best way to do it. When you first start a blog you want to start by posting weekly to just start your network there and to get your users or the readers familiar with your blog and that way they can anticipate each week that there'll be a new post and get them sort of in the habit of reading your blog. You can do auto posting which if you know that you're going to be busy from 10 to 2 which most people are during the week, you can set up say on Sunday you can write your blog out and prepare it and everything and then save it and have it set to auto post at a particular day and time so that it's done, you don't have to worry about it, it's out there and you can do that the same time and day every week. The ideal is to build up your posting to daily. You can post daily that's the ideal that's not overkill yet, you don't want to post several times a day and of course your posts want to be relevant to your patrons and your community and your readership and you want to invite readers to comment on your posts which encourages the social engagement and really helps make people appreciate your blog and show connection with your blog and then you want to reply to their comments. You don't want to leave people hanging. You want to let them know there's another person on the end of the blog that cares about what they're saying and that there's a social interaction there and you also want to include widgets on the blog post for sharing to social media so at the end of each post of our blog we have a Facebook sharing button Twitter, LinkedIn, all of the different social media buttons that way if someone wants to share their post it's easy they can just click a button and go. Through WordPress there is a thing called Reader which makes it very convenient to publish a post if you don't have anything pressing at your library to talk about. You can use the readers to find posts relevant to whatever you're looking for. On the right hand side you'll see topics and you can go through those and you'll notice libraries there, Hobbits, those are the most popular topics that people are looking at blogs for right now or you can also search for topics such as library, author, books and then you find posts as you'll see on the left hand side here are some posts of the blogs that our blog follows so that we can see each every time they post those are the ones that we have re-blogged before so we can continue our network there and then you can re-blog the posts which sounds a little bit, we'll discuss that in the next slide but that way you can expand your network without having to create new posts all of the time. So re-blogging. Here is an example of re-blogging for our library a popular blog on WordPress is called The Librarian who doesn't say shh and we recently posted a blog from this we recently re-blog a blog from this that was called Top 10 Favorite Romances and it's from a weekly internet meme called the Top 10 Tuesday. When you re-blog something you save time in creating the post for the day and you expand your network so whenever you re-blog something the person that you re-blog it from goes on to your site and typically they'll make comments and they'll also start following your blog to expand your network and you can reach a lot more readers that way because perhaps they will start re-blogging your posts because the idea is to expand your network let's talk about that now. Billing your network in closing I want to discuss networking which is one of the biggest deals with blogging to get your website recognized by users who are searching for either your library or your city when they do a Google search. This has to do with search engine ranking which is a very complicated algorithm however the ultimate goal is to get your blog on the first few pages of the Google search results. To do this you want to build your network and here are some tips some ways to do that. First you want to include posts on your blog about your library of course but you also want to include a majority of posts about your community about other businesses and organizations and if they have websites and blogs you want to talk about those on the library blog to just expand your network there and you also want to encourage local businesses and organizations to post about your library blog on their blog sort of a win-win situation there you post about them they post about you and you share the information perhaps you have a live chamber of commerce that you can talk about their website or blog and then they can mention your blog on their website and all of the people that would not normally look for the library blog would see that on the chamber of commerce page and just expand your outreach there. You also can read blog posts from other blogs which we've mentioned that have similar interests such as other library blogs you could hook up with other library blogs in your state or at least in your community and you can also guest post on other blogs which means you can write posts for other blogs and when you do that you want to hyperlink to your own blog in that post so that it's connecting your website back to through the post. And that's the end of my presentation. So anybody has any questions? Yes, we do have a couple questions. Let's see. We can go back to onto your slides I guess so we don't have the black screen or something. Okay. We do have one question I'm going to jump to those ones but someone wants to know when you talk about when to post what time the 10 am to 2 pm they wonder if that was eastern time I think you meant whatever your local time is correct? Right, whatever your time zone is. Because typically people that are in your area will be searching for stuff about they'll be more related to your library stuff so we would be more interested in information about the Midwest than we would about the east post. Let's say your time zone on that. Another question, do you recommend having both a website and a Facebook page? Is it redundant? Is there a time issue? I have some answers to that but what do you guys think? I think that it's good both ways. It does take a little bit more time to have the blog and the Facebook page but once you get into habit of it you can do a new blog post in 15 or 20 minutes a day. We create a new blog post and we have new books out and then we or we have a program that happens such as a story time or book club and then whenever we publish it on the blog it automatically publishes to Facebook so we kill two birds with one stone there. That's not going to say you don't really have to worry about the time issue because you can't have things automatically feed right in your Facebook page and boom it's got the content that you created on your blog. Right, right. I will say you will have to then pay attention to people leaving comments on your blog and on the Facebook page but you don't have to write it twice so there is still a little extra time. Right. Another question, do you require photography release to use pictures of minors on either your Facebook page or your blog? That would be an issue if we had parents that the parents that are involved in the story time are active in the story time and they are okay with having the pictures on the Facebook page and they're by the blog. We've never had any parent that has said that they don't want to have their pictures taken and when I do take the pictures during the programming I always say these are going to be posted on Facebook page and then if we were going to put it in the newspaper we would always mention that too. That gives the parents an opportunity to speak up and say I don't want my child on the Facebook or the blog and yet we haven't had that issue and they're definitely open not to put that on there if they do not want it of course. Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Let them know and then they can write there and say please don't. That's it for our questions from the audience at the moment. If anybody has any questions go ahead and type them in. Any more coming through? One test did come in. Why should I blog? Why would you blog as opposed to just having a Facebook page? We, there's not well Facebook is the most popular form of social media but the more avenues of social media you have the more frequency the more availability you have online. So say we could also do a Pinterest page that shows crafts and stuff that we do at the library. The more avenues you have the greater you can expand your network and there's more opportunities for exposure for your library. Exactly, yes. Yeah, I totally agree with that and I will expand stuff you put in Facebook can only be found in Facebook. So if you post about new books in the library on Facebook and somebody Googles your library wanting to know what new books you've got they're not going to find it. So by putting it on a blog which is kind of out on the open internet and not in the kind of closed environment of Facebook you thereby increase the exposure that way also. And it's like what you're saying too it goes along with the be where your patrons and users are. If they're using Facebook then you know that and have something there but not everyone does. There are many, many people that are not on Facebook and are against it and have issues with it for various reasons so you can make sure that you're being where your users will get to you. Know your audience, know your town, know your community and work with where they are. Well your blog is part of your website isn't it? I mean if you have a website and so you've got access to your computerized catalogs on your website advertisements for your programs are going to be on your website your policies and procedures we hope will be on your website then it's just logical to have a blog as a place to post things about events and interesting news items and stuff on your website right? Right more of the current events section because your website is stagnant once you put that on there it's usually not changed unless there's a major change in the library so having a blog is just the current events what's happening day to day it's more personal I think for our community. And one of our upcoming presenters sent us a question in a separate back channel we have here have you ever thought about attaching a blog for your patrons to review books linked to your website so either a separate blog for your patrons or maybe change a little and say encouraging your patrons to make great content for your blog. That's a great idea I like that idea don't be great especially to create new posts and to make more of a community effort that's a great idea. No we haven't thought about that but I am now and you can do that on Facebook also I know Omaha Public periodically will put on their Facebook page something like you know hey we just got this great look what else by this author have you read or ask questions to kind of encourage that contribution of the content. Someone just commented to our OPAC allows patrons to rate and review titles so that's another way of getting your patrons involved and what's going on with your library offerings. One last question that I'll throw out there. One last question which I don't even know how we're going to answer this one how many social networks do libraries use all of them whatever is available. I would think the most relevant. Like you could do the good read you could have a good reads group for your library which would be really relevant. The Pinterest page is really relevant for summer reading programs where you can go on there and a lot of libraries post their crafts and activities for summer reading LinkedIn would not be one I would probably use. LinkedIn. That really is the same purpose. Obviously depending on how much staff you have you can only spend so much time on this. And I would say ask your patrons what social networks are you using. If 99% of your patrons say they're on Facebook well hey that's probably a good place to start if you're trying to reach some Pinterest. Maybe you want to try Pinterest. You don't have to be everywhere. We realize that it is time consuming but you need to be somewhere. You need to be out there. Alright, so thank you Pam and Miranda that was wonderful. Looks like we've gotten through our questions and we are at the 50 minute mark so we are right on schedule as we should be. Thank you ladies very much. That was a wonderful presentation.