Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, etc.) can be an incredibly valuable tool for your library, non-profit or university. It can also be a burden. Knowing how and when to engage with social media vs. going-it-alone will help you get the most out of both the myriad of tools out there, and your own website.
The most essential thing to understand about social media is it will only work for you if you treat it as a social tool. It is not a means of simply pushing information out to your community, and may not benefit you much if that is how you use it.
Which social media platforms should you use?
The answer to this question depends entirely on your organization and target audience. While Facebook and Twitter are the mainstays that everyone feels are "must haves," they will only benefit you if you have people on your staff who enjoy using them, and community members who are active on them. A quiet Twitter feed or Facebook page will not serve you in any way. Think about the uniqueness of your community, and how the tools would be used by it:- Are you a teen librarian with a group of teens who love photography? Consider an Instagram account that also auto-posts to Facebook, and make sure your teens tag photos they want to share with the library with your @username.
- Is your library hosting a series of events with local authors? Consider a Twitter account that follows and occasionally retweets those authors' posts. Make sure that you have a designated #hashtag for the series so that patrons can tweet about the events themselves, as well.
- Does your non-profit create quality 1-3 minute video messages on a regular basis? Take advantage of Youtube, which not only allows comments, but also embedding and sharing, and enable your community to spread your message for you.
Make your community members feel special
Social media is about providing a large number of people with small, easily digestible, and more easily shared bits of information.If a user feels personally invested in the post, they are likely to spread it for you.
For example, "We are hosting [Event] on this [Date]" isn't likely to get much traction. Some members of your community will take note and jot it into their calendar, but it will only be seen by those who happen to catch a glimpse of your post before it leaves their ever-changing news feed. On the other hand, "We are excited to host [Our Town's] very own [Lucy Anne] reading from her newly published book on [Date]" is likely to generate a lot more interest. Not only will your community members see it in their feeds, but you can bet that many of Lucy Anne's proud friends and family members will repost your announcement on their own platform of choice, as well. Call out the individual people that make up your staff and community, and their social networks will do the rest.Respond, repost and favorite posts from your community.
Nothing will generate loyal followers (who will spread your content for you) faster than making those individuals feel heard. Watch the platforms you choose to engage with for #hashtags and @mentions that are relevant to you. Whenever you see something worth reposting, favoriting or replying to, do so! That one simple and quick action will be worth a hundred of your own posts. The best example I can give you is from my own personal experience. On my 32 birthday, my friends took me to a restaurant that, to be honest, I enjoy but doesn't really have the best food. My friend Diana tweeted a photo of me eating a decadent (and very delicious) chocolate mousse, and included @rainbreaw (my twitter username) and @[restaurant-name] in the caption. About 1/2 an hour later, the restaurant not only retweeted her post, but also posted "Happy Birthday @rainbreaw" on their various accounts. Not only have I been a die-hard fan of that restaurant since, but both Diana and I shared their post on Facebook, to our nearly 2000 combined friends, with eager enthusiasm. The restaurant received a lot of free marketing that night.Using third party tools such as Youtube or Flickr for providing content
If you have a lot of video or photo content, you need a means of distributing it. While space and bandwidth are both now quite (comparatively) cheap, the skills and time needed to set up your website to serve photo and video content well are not. More critically, the maintenance required can be taxing on a budget. Using third party tools such as Youtube, Archive.org, Vimeo and Flickr rather than attempting to host your video or photo yourselves gives you:- a service that handles performance and compatibility with current technologies for you
- an extremely large audience that you can leverage to expand your reach
- easy buttons anyone can use to quickly share or embed your content
- in the unlikely event that one of these services goes away, you will need to rebuild your library elsewhere (and be dependent on your backups of the videos or photos)
- if you have the budget, time and/or resources, hosting video yourself will allow you to make use of quality players such as Kaltura, which make it easier for things like transcoding and captioning