The Library and Social Media

An important aspect of any organization is promotion and today, no promotion is more useful than social media. Not only is it a great medium for word of mouth, but it also allows organizations to connect with their users on a closer level. Most people are not going to visit a website every day, but if they see news about an organization in their Twitter feed, then the organization has managed to insinuate themselves into the user’s daily life in a personal way. It is a great way to keep an organization relevant in someone’s mind.

Social media has been especially useful with libraries. During class presentations, it became very clear that many libraries relied on Facebook. Even if the official website hadn’t been redesigned in ten years, the Facebook page was up to date and very active. The library I profiled maintained very active Facebook and Twitter accounts with an impressive amount of likes, comments, and followers for the size of the community they were serving. And that seems to be the part of social media that many libraries struggle with — they have the accounts, but the community is not engaging with them. So what’s the problem?

Dowd (2013) suggests that the answer is quite simple: libraries simply don’t know what to post. She means this both in terms of content and in terms of what they are allowed to post. Because social media is still somewhat new, many libraries do not have an exact set of rules for what is and isn’t allowed to be posted. Libraries also struggle with posting content that their users will find interesting. Dowd (2013) mentions numerous ways to combat this, including posting fun posts along with informational ones and finding social media-savvy people to run the social media pages. If a member of the team is familiar with Twitter and has successfully engaged with people on it before, then they should be given a framework of principles that the library stands by and be left alone to have fun with the social media (Dowd 2013). Ultimately, it seems, the more genuine and fun a library’s social media page is, the more likely people are to want to engage with it.

References:

Dowd, N. (2013). Social media: Libraries are posting, but is anyone listening? Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/marketing/social-media-libraries-are-posting-but-is-anyone-listening/#_