My name is Jennifer Peterson. I'm here to help host today's session. I'm pleased to be able to let folks know that we are co-hosting the session in collaboration with TechSoup as a part of our series. We will be continuing the series at the end of November and a final session on December 19th. These are all of our wonderful presenters for the series, and we're so excited that you all are here. As I mentioned, today's session will be recorded and we will be posting the recording later today. We will let you know once the recording has been posted via E-Mail. As all of our recordings and all of our other webinar -- library-related courses are made available in the WebJunction catalog, and we will be sending a certificate to all of you who joined live today, but if you have learners that require certificates, all of our learning in the catalog is available with a certificate. And all of the content in the catalog is free and available to all who work or volunteer in libraries. Thank you to the generous support of OCLC and state library agencies across the country. If you are not yet subscribed to Crossroads, our WebJunction newsletter is a way to stay up to date on our events, resources, program and opportunities for learning together. So we look forward to seeing you there. I'm really excited to be able to -- you don't need to see my arrow -- to bring Molly Bacon in to the session today. Molly comes to us from TechSoup and is going to talk briefly about the opportunities available to libraries on TechSoup. So Molly, I'm going to let you take over. >> Hi. Welcome. I'm so excited to see so many people saying hi from all over. Going to be a great webinar today. Thank you for joining us. I'm the social media manager at TechSoup. TechSoup for libraries is a program that grew out of a desire to specifically address the technology needs for libraries. We're a global nonprofit. We provide a lot of resources and training, webinars, newsletters, technology for libraries. Since the time of our launch, TechSoup has saved libraries over $160 million in technology and we serve just over half of the public libraries in the United States and hope to eventually serve all. This is just a quick list of our -- or big list of our corporate partners. These are some of the donations that the technology companies give to us. There's really something for every library system. So who can access TechSoup technology? A lot of libraries fall in to this category but if not you can benefit from TechSoup free webinars and resources. Visit our website at soup http://www.techsoup.org /libraries how your library can benefit. Not only do we have a large category of software we havent discounted hardware and we also offer mobile hotspots. And that is popular for mobile and hotspot programs. So patrons can bring the internet home. And so, in addition to our program, we have free webinars. This is an exciting webinar today. I hope you enjoy. >> Fantastic. Thank you, Molly. Excellent. >> Well, I just want to -- as we get started, I wanted to mention to you, based on your registration information, give you a snapshot of who's here today. I know I have been excited to see all of you chiming in to chat. We wanted to point out that more than half of our registrants come from small or rural communities, and we are always excited to hear from you folks, knowing that some of your situations may be different, but we welcome all of you here. We know that most of our attendees come from public libraries, but excited to see some academic folks here, as well as school folks, folks from state libraries, special libraries, consortiums and many that represent other organizations, nonprofit organizations in their communities. So we're really excited to have you here today. I also wanted to be sure that folks know there are a number of resources that have been collected, especially for this session today. There's a learner guide that is available for everyone to use either in conjunction with the series, work between the series. This is a tool for you to learn together with your colleagues, your volunteers, some action steps for you to take. There's also a social media starter kit that TechSoup has created that we encourage folks to explore as another set of tools to take your learning further. And also, there's a worksheet that Jessica has created specific to today's, some of the activities that she recommends in terms of exploring your social media presence on Facebook. So all of those resources are available on the event page. I'm going to put that link in here fresh so that you can see that's the one-stop-shop for all of the resources. We will be adding all of the resources that you all bring to the conversation, as well, to that resource page. No need to take vigorous notes. We will be sharing those with you on that page. We also in conjunction with this series have created a survey that we have been using to collect your experiences with social media. There's a survey. The survey will remain live actually through December 19th. And Molly actually has done an excellent job of providing a snapshot of the -- I will put that link in there, as well. A lot of links to share today. For you to take a peek at where with are with the surveys, but there were 311 respondents when we kind of took the first collection of survey respondents. There are 400 respondents as of today, and we look forward to collecting even more data that we will put in to a report at the beginning of the year. So know this is another way for you to participate in the series. This is just a snapshot of one of the questions. We're hoping to tap in to some of these examples of how you in libraries are using social media. So know that we will be continuing to collect your responses there, but this is providing us with excellent information to create the session today. So -- I also wanted to give a little nod to our WebJunction social media. We follow your social media presence on Facebook in libraries. We actually have been doing it for 94, I just published today's edition, 94 volumes which cover a number of different -- actually over 400 libraries are featured in the social library series. I wanted to point it out because it's a great way for you to see how libraries are using Facebook. We actually have a spread sheet that we update each week that sorts the ways, the topics around each of the social library examples. So if you are looking for instance, for programming inspiration, you can go to the spreadsheet and look and sort by the different programming efforts and it's an easy way to get inspired by your colleagues in the library field. Also I want to point out that WebJunction hosts the Geek the Library page on Facebook. We have a number of folks both within libraries and library supporters that have liked and followed this page. As we talk about content generators, folks that you can on Facebook, libraries that you can get inspired by. I know that Jessica will be talking a lot about content generators. We'd love to see you use that content from Geek the Library on Facebook. We are ready to begin our presenters today. I'm really excited that Amy Hitchner is here today with us. She comes to us from the Colorado state State Library as the clabtive programming coordinator and Jessica Bacon, the founder of the "The 5 Minute Librarian." We will get that link in chat, as well. I am so pleased to have Amy kick us off today. Welcome, Amy. >> Thanks, Jennifer. Glad I got my technical issues fixed, hopefully and I'm back up and running. So, I want to welcome everyone here today. I'm honored to be here with you. I'm the collaborative programming coordinator at the Colorado state library. And since November of 2016 I have been coordinating the state library social media. Like many of you here, I am also a learner. I'm not -- I wasn't born and bred a social media marketer by any stretch of the imagination. I'm learning along with everyone. Today I want to present a high-level overview of how to get setup and running with social media if you are, in fact, the person at your library or on the team at your library that's just getting started. So as we go along, many of the resources and tools that I mention are linked on the final slide, which are also on the event page for today's event. So as we go along here, a couple of objectives to keep in mind. What we will be doing is learning to make a basic social media plan to maximize your limited resources and staff time. I realize that many of you here are from small, or rural libraries, which hold a special place in my heart. In Colorado, we have pockets of these libraries around the state. The energy is fantastic. I just love going out there. So these are some ideas if you are on limited staff time and budget to get you up and running. We will talk about some resources that are useful to first-time social media managers and/or content creators and at the end we will learn some basic high-level graphic design principals you can use when you are creating content. Because image-based content is important in social media. What is social media? In my mind it is the digital space where you interact your community. It is really a modern day expectation that businesses, organizations have a social media presence. It is different from other marketing tools in that it is not just for pushing information. It is not just me telling you about the things going on in the library, but it is also for an engagement with your community. That's really the key part of social media is that you are trying to reach your community members in a meaningful way so they engage with your posts and feel connected to your organization. Your patrons can be your best advocates on-line. So if you put something out there on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and they become your mouthpiece. There's legitimacy to that. You want to encourage those interactions. Social media is also a great space to reinforce the partnerships that you have with other organizations. So, for instance, the Colorado State Library has partnerships with Colorado Parks and Wildlife and another organization called Get Outdoors Colorado and we like and retweet and those fun social media-type interactions. You can also show the world what partnerships you have and collaborate in that space, as well. So one of the first things that I think a lot of folks -- the big burden that comes down is I don't know how to do this. I'm not a social media manager. I'm not a marketer. I'm a librarian. I was never trained to do this. But answer, especially when it is -- when we talk about those things are a little outside of our comfort zone or a little bit outside of what we were trained to do, it is a good thing we are librarians and our super power is learning. We can learn all kinds of things that can help us, and this is no exemption. If you are in a situation where you library wants to get started with social media, my big message to you is you can just jump in and start. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have a budget. You don't need to have a history of doing this. What you do need is to go and find where the energy is in your organization. You need to find out who's really excited to be a megaphone for your library and regardless of that person's title or position, you need to harness that energy because that person will be always looking for a way to make your library presence on social media more engaging and more interactive. So that's almost exactly what happened in my situation. We had an employee that left the state library. She was managing social media accounts, and when that sort of role became available I said I'd love to do it. I'd love to tell the world amazing thing thals are happening at the Colorado State Library and to tell the world about the incredible things happening in the State of Colorado. I took that on and gathered a team together. So that would be my number one piece of advice. Don't let the I don't think I don't know how" stop you. You need to find out where the energy is at and eventually the expertise will come. Leverage some of your communities. So if you have a teen group, a digital photography group, if you have folks coming in to your library regularly that are excited, find ways to harness that resource. Those people can also help you in this endeavor. Let's talk about an overarching social media plan. We will go in to each in more detail. When you talk about creating a social media plan you will have a couple of different elements. You will have your team. It could be just you, although I discourage it just being one person. For reasonsly go in to in just a moment. But you want to assemble your team. Define goals, determine your budget, plan to plan. Make sure you get those meetings on the books. Gather your content and schedule it regularly. And you want to make sure that you are feeding and watering your social media. We will talk about what that will look like. And then finally you want to make sure that you are completing the loop by going back and looking at your analytics. Making sure the efforts you are making are producing something. If they are not, can you change tactics a little bit? That's the overarching plan. It may look like other plans that you make for other parts of your library life. That's because social media shouldn't be outside of what you normally do. It should be something that you incorporate in to over planning along with your marketing and programs and event and outreach and all of that stuff. So it shouldn't look too scary from what you have encountered before. Assembling your team. Again, I encourage you to go where your energy is. Expertise can be learned, but motivation is hard to conjure from thin air. So find who those people are that are excited about your library and what it is doing, that want to tell the world and engage more people in an on-line space. When you assemble your team, you want to make sure you are agreeing on your roles and expectations. This is like a project management tip. If the folks on your team don't really understand their role on that team, things can get a little messy. In our team, we have folks from different areas of the state library that meet once a month. And they are sort of like my content people. They come and we all have a roundtable discussion and we talk about things that are going on their teams or in the state library, in general. Do they need to be on social media? What's the time line? And we build our content from there. So those are my content creators. Then I am more of the planning it and getting, you know, where the rubber hits the road, getting it out on the channels and monitoring the channels, but if I didn't have that amazing team of folks who came every month and helped me build that content, I wouldn't know everything that is going on and all of the different facets of the state library that I need to be talking about. Those folks also bring news from other areas of Colorado that they may have been working in to say, hey did you know that a library down in durango or Greeley is doing something awesome and we do that, as well. Agree on your roles and expectations. This is important when you set up account access. Each social media channel does something a little bit -- has a different way of managing different roles. It might be like administrator and then an editor, contributor or something like that. You need to make sure you know who has which role when setting up those accounts. Document that, if you win the lottery and leave tomorrow, something is written down of who all the people are and their relationship to those accounts. Defining your goals. To avoid a just because syndrome, we want to be on Twitter just because that's what we do. You want to avoid that. You want to choose things that are more strategic, tied to your goals, that align with any overarching marketing goals that your organization might have. You should also take in to consideration your intended audience when you create your goals. Who are you trying to reach? Is there a specific age range? Any of those sort of things. It can be specific or as broad as you want to be, but I do encourage you to define your goals. Otherwise, every new, shiny, wonderful thing that comes along you will try to do it rather than saying, no, we will try this for a while and look at our analytic and go from there. Be strategic about it. Our goals at the state library are to educate, excite and engage. Our specific target audience isn't the general public. It's other librarians in Colorado. Because of the nature of our organization, we are a support agency, we are state level and our primary audience are other librarians and not necessarily the general public. Depending on what type of organization you are from that could be, you know, it could be different. So, again, it's a good conversation to have with your team. With your own manager. And just with your organization in general. What are we trying to do and who are we trying to reach with social media? Okay. So this is an example of how -- what not to do with your goals. Your goals shouldn't be to just use only social media platforms. There are so many, I want to do them all. I want to have the biggest reach. I want to be on Instagram, Twitter, linked in. If we are talking small budgets and staff time you don't have -- you don't have resources to spread yourself over that many platforms. Also, you are going to find certain platforms reach certain audiences differently. So your time spent on Pinterest may not be the best idea but maybe Instagram works better. Some of that is trial and error. I encourage you to pick two and study your analytics and go from there. The state is on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, everybody is on Facebook it seems like. That's our big bang for our buck. With Twitter is more of an experiment. It is more of a newsfeed look and feel. We are newsing numbers across Twitter in general are declining a bit. Maybe we may look at trying something else in the future. Maybe we might look at Instagram because it is more photo based and quickly -- it's growing quickly. you hear more buzz about it. We started small with two and we will grow from there and see if we need to cut out any as we go along. As far as choosing platforms, I would say that while each has its strength and its weaknesses, there's no one-size-fits all. We find in different parts of the state, one platform may reach a specific target group, as well. The other side of the state and it doesn't do well. Pinterest may do well in Jefferson County and not well in La Plata County. That's why I encourage you to look at your analytics. Another part of the plan you will put together is your budget. You could have a budget of zero dollars. I will tell you our budget at the state library for social media is zero dollars. We're making it work. We're making it happen. You can get it done. With a few extra dollars, however, you could do a few extra things. You could buy a subscription to iStock or some photo website and get nice stock photo images you can use when creating your graphics. You could pay for Facebook advertising, which is not as expensive as you may think. Sometimes it is $3 to $5 a day to boost certain posts up. And I've heard from other libraries in our state that are doing that that it works very well. If you had a little bit of a budget you could pay for some Facebook advertising. Another way, if you had a little extra money, upgrade to the pro subscription of some design tools. Canva is excellent. They have a subscription service where there is a free and paid version. The paid version is, of course, much nicer. You could have that or if you are on HootSuit or some other manage tool upgrade to the pro version. And if you have a little more, you could pay a graphic designer to help you design some of the templates that you use on social media so that things look really nice and sharp. Again, you don't need any of those things but they are nice if you have a little bit of budget. So plan to plan. This is straightforward. Make sure your social media team is meeting regularly so that you are all on the same page with -- what are the campaigns that we are going to be focusing on this month? What's the content? What's happening in your team? Do we need toe schedule certain types of tweets or posts about it? Just make sure you are meeting regularly. Again, we meet once a month but that may not work for your team. You can make sure to plan whatever works best for your environment with the amount of people that you have. It could be less formal, more formal. That's really up to you but make sure you get something regular on the books. Then this is my favorite part, the content calendar. This is a trick that I learned at Library Marketing and Communications Conference that is on every year. It is in Dallas in November. If you have the budget to send someone to that, I encourage you to go. It is hands on and useful, very useful. The big takeaway I got from that conference is you need to make a content calendar. It can be very simple. Ours is a Google sheet. Someone asked what the conference was, Library Marketing and Communications Conference. It could be an complel or Google sheet but whatever you need to document your content and plan it. I will show you an example of what it looks like. You can use it to schedule posts ahead of time, which is a huge time saver in the long run. It also helps you to spread the content apart. So if you are scheduling three related posts, you want to make sure they are not like, you know, the same day or within a couple of days of each other. If you want to spread it out over three weeks, let's say, so your content calendar helps you to visually see when everything is scheduled. It can help you plan out more static, regular-type posts, and then when you go if for your daily check-in of your social media sites you can spice it up with little memes or fun stuff you may find that day, something more timely and current. So I definitely encourage you to make a content calendar and to make sure that that content calendar is accessible to every person of your team. That can look very different, depending on where you are and the technology you have available. We use Google sheets or on a shared drive. Or if you want to go low tech it could be a piece of paper on a shared space in your library. That's up to you. Make sure it is shared with everyone on the team. A word about content that you are planning. I mentioned you want to spice up your regular oh, like your events and your regular things with fun, timely stuff. My word of caution is to make sure as you are doing that, like you see something awesome and you want to share it, make sure you have an idea in your head what your social media voice is for your library. What you don't want to do is kind of go off the rails. If you typically have more of a straightforward professional tone, that you are all of a sudden throwing in weird funny, but a little off the wall or a little naughty memes, that's not a good idea typically. You want to make sure that you understand the voice that you are trying to convey for your library and to choose fun, timely content that stays within that voice. So that everything seems cohesive. And that everybody on your social media team understands sort of what that voice is so they don't, again, go off the rails and do something a little more risque. Maybe that's what your library is in to. Maybe that's what they encourage and that's fine. But for an organization like us, we're a state agency, we have to be conservative about what we put out there. The other tip I would say about writing the actual posts is to focus on the content rather than the event details. In other words, lead with the punch line. This is not a press release. This is how this is different than a regular marketing job. I'm not just telling everybody about events coming up. I'm trying to make them stop and read and by giving them the punch line first, it gives them a moment to say, wait a minute, I may want to do that. For example, here's two different tweets that I composed one of them is more marketing and one is more content based. The first example is, our next webinar is October 23rd. Okay. Great. So we have a webinar October 23rd. Not many people will stop on that. But a different way to put it hey, library services for seniors and those with memory loss. Watch our free webinar on October 23rd. I put the content, the part that will grab people at the beginning because as they are scrolling through their feed that's what they will see first. So lead with the punch line. Here's an example of what our shared social media calendar looks like. You can see it is very basic. We have a row for if it has been scheduled or whether it had been done, the date, the channels it is going out on. CVL is our blog, Facebook, Twitter, an E-Mail mailing list that we have and content if we need to include a link or image or that kind of thing. It is literally a spread sheet. It's easy as that. I encourage you to explore the tools that you have and see what will work for your library. So feed and water your social media channels regularly. This is about creating your work flow. All right. Social media does not have to be time intensive, but it does need to be consistent. When I took over our Facebook page, we were at 540 likes. That was in November of 2016. About six months later, we were up to 600 likes, and really, you know, like I said I was getting started. I was a learner. Everybody on the team was learning. It's not like we were creating these amazing posts with all of the click bait and all of that stuff. We were -- the only thing we were trying to do is make sure we were posting least one thing every day. That's it. So we just tried to post one thing, whether it was scheduled or in the moment. We tried to get something out every day of the week. And just by doing that, just by showing our audience that we were there and we were waving at them and saying, hello, the state library is here, all of a sudden we went from 540 to 600 likes. I think now we are up to 650. So, it is -- really it is about being consistent. It is better that you be consistent than it is that you create like ten amazing posts per day. My tip on that is to make sure you are using a scheduling tool. You can use Tweet Deck, you can use Hoot Suite. Find a good scheduling too much I go back and forth between Tweet Deck and whatever is internal in Facebook. They have their own scheduling component. I get in there once a week. I schedule a bunch of stuff out so I don't have to worry about that and every day I drop in for five, ten, 15 minutes, see what is happening, respond, like, comment, do that regular maintenance. And then that's it. So that could be -- if all you have is an hour for scheduling posts and ten minutes a day for checking in on your accounts, that could be your social media time for the week Plus, your meetings with your team monthly. It doesn't have to be time intensive. Can you get in there and lose yourself? Of course. But if all you have is a little time every day you can get it done. Finally, this is what I need to get better at frankly, analytics. You need to define what is working and what is not they help you see the views, engagements and likes. When you meet with your social media team I encourage you to sit down with them, here's the month of October and here's the numbers. Here's how it compared to last month's numbers. What do you think accounted for this? What kind of posts are getting good feedback and can we do more of that in the future? I feel that is a pretty easy thing that most of us can do, even if we are not super data geeks. You can go down a rabbit hole and get crazy with it. It depends on what your team is in to. Okay. So that was the basic social media plan. Can you get more complex? Yes, you can. Do you need to? Not at the beginning. I really don't think you do. Let's pause for a second and talk about social media graphics. Why they matter. And how you can create better ones. So your social media presence is going to be primarily image driven. It's not to say that you don't have text content but what is going to stop people as they are scrolling through their feeds are very compelling images. You need to figure out how to make yours better or more compelling. If you are DIYing your social media you are probably doing it to graphics, too. Sometimes home grown designs can look home grown. I have been guilty of it myself. When I started to create better graphics I started to notice we got better clicks. So we are going to talk about some basic high-level graphic design things that you can put in place today no matter what tool you are using. It could be Adobe by Photo shop that I don't know how to use. But I recommend Canv a 0 something where someone has already paid someone to do it. You don't have to go to design school. Use something that somebody has already does well. Here are some high-level things to keep in mind. Visual hierarchy and white space. As librarians we tend to think the white space is precious and we if need to fill it up to make maximum use and that creates visual clutter. Visual hierarchy means that you need to make the most important things the easiest to see and to be Ruthless about decluttering. White space is a complement to that. White space helps the eye move through the design and know where to look next. So if you can eliminate unnecessary clutter out of your designs and make the most important things the biggest, you are on the way to good visual hierarchy. We will move through these pretty quickly. But understand that in this case, less is usually more and the mistake that move us make is we try to fill every inch of that space or every pixel with something. That is actually going at cross purposes with what you want. Second, get the word and clip art out of there. If it came from Microsoft Word in the '90s it does not need to be in your designs anymore. Get them out. Use regular Fontes. There are some fun Fontes out there. That's great. It makes it look dated, like we are stuck in 1995. For the most part get it out of there. It might be fun it is a retro theme. Use an icon instead of clip art. I have a resource at the end called The Noun Project. It has free icons that look classy and not like '90s clip art. The other part of creating better graphics is use a few fonts and colors. Two to three of each whether it is font or color. Here's a great example of a homemade poster. I think I found it through the DPLA. This is a great example of somebody doing it themselves and it turned out great. They are using red and yellow. A nice neutral background. They have used two fonts and that's it. Your eye knows exactly how to move through this page or this poster and even though these pictures somebody cut them out and pasted them on it still looks fabulous. I think it is a great example of a home grown design, done well because they didn't overload the page with too much Fontes and too many colors. So scale that back. Focus on what is important and draw the attention with a few fonts and colors. People try to resize images and they take the handle and drag it to whatever size their want and everything looks stretched and weird. My suggestion is to crop it or resize it. Here's a pro tip. When you click shift and drag the corner of the image it will proportionately resize it. You can also click -- there's usually a lock aspect ratio button. Click that so you don't get weird stretched images. Because that says I'm an amateur at resizing my images to whoever sees it. Crop or resize them. Do not stretch them out. And then finally templates. Your new best friends. These are templates from Canva. I have heard people in the chat get crazy and fun about them. I agre. Check them out. Have fun with them and realize they have paid graphic designers to do this for them so you don't have to learn to do it yourself. If something doesn't work exactly, you can use specific elements and then customize the way you want, but start with a template. It is going to look so much nicer in the long run. Templates for the sizes. There is Facebook, Instagram post. And use your templates and you will start to think you look like a graphic designer and your designs will more professional. So use your templates. This is that slide I was telling y'all about. This will be able on the events page. I encourage you to take a look. I have some images, resources and design tool resources and then on the left more learning and training for your further learning. I encourage you to jump in, start, learn along the way, keep learning and know that you are going to get better as you go along. No one is perfect the first time out of the gate. So that's where we are. I think I did it. Did it I get it in >> That's a lot of information. People have been busy in chat and I want to reassure people that chat will be available on the the resource page so you can refer back to it. A couple of things I want to note. There were some questions and sharing around scheduling tools. And I thought this is a perfect example of article we could write. I'm going to work on collecting some of what was shared in chat but if anyone wants to write an article about scheduling tools, let me know and we can publish it within the time frame of the series. I'll also mention there were a couple of questions about policies around getting photo permissions and that's another topic that surfaced in our survey that we put out. A number of libraries have provided examples of policies, both policies for staff, as well as policies for the public around social media. I want to let you know that is coming. Amy, I'd love to get your thoughts on one question that came up a little earlier. You know, knowing that you have been working with especially libraries, perhaps, that are just getting started with social media, there's a real common occurrence I know that happens where people really have to get buy in in order to set aside the time to do social media or to even create a social media presence for their library. Can you talk a little bit about -- I know Sharice talked about it but can you give us thoughts on how to explain the value this presence on social media can bring to your library? >> Yeah. I think she will be able to speak to folks who need to bring numbers to their managers to make it seem like they should go ahead with it. There's certain managers that respond to analytics and that kind of thing and others respond to different type of conversations and motivations. Luckily, in my situation, because we already had social media sort of up and running, I was able to sort of take it and go with it. I keep coming back to this is just a modern day expectation. This would be like saying, we need a website and someone else going why do we need a website. It's just kind of the modern day expectation of how you interact with folks in your community. It could be strange if you were to look up an organization and find out they were not on social media at all. It would not seem -- yeah, it's just a modern day expectation. As far as trying to convince management of something that you weren't already starting, I'd say start with analytics and but start by saying, we have a website and this is an extension of where that needs to go. I also heard -- oh, she's great. There's a central library manager at Denver Public Library. Rachel Fuel. She is fantastic. I remember her saying one time, when we want to communicate with our patrons the previous way of doing it is we stood in the library and yelled out on to the street, hey, everybody on the street, look at all of the fantastic things we are doing in here and maybe some looked up and walked in. But what social media does is make you go to the street and talk to people out there to tell the people on the street, hey, the library is over here and we are doing a great job and we'd love to have you come in. It is getting out of your building and connecting with people where they already are. People are already in social media, you know, by the millions and billions. So the fact you are not out there interacting with them seems a little odd. So get out on the streets. Get out to where people are and where they are already having conversations so you can talk with them. >> Excellent. That's great. I saw one comment, is it better to be on -- is it better to be on social media and not be good at it or not on social media at all? I loved your suggestion of just starting small, one post a day, or maybe it is one post every three days, you know, you can start small and I think you will be surprised at how good you could be. >> I would also add to that, if -- there's -- I mean there are a couple of ways to be bad at social media but it usually involves lawyers and stuff. So -- if you have a question about actual content, I would maybe put a pause on it and talk to somebody first. But you can't really be bad at it if you are being genuine about wanting to connect with your patrons. Look at the conversations that they are having. How can you help? How can you jump in? Look at what other libraries are doing and ask yourself what is so successful about what they are doing and can I emulate that? I see some folks from Washington State in the webinar today. I'm from Washington originally. I always sort of pay attention. But Washington State library has a fantastic social media presence. A lot of times I sort of just check out what they are doing and see, gosh, could I emulate that in our library? They must have an amazing team over there. Can I do some of that? And if you are a small library, wondering if you should and how to start, look at what is successful for other libraries and try to emulate it. Are they doing a lot of funny stuff, image-based posts? What's working for them and can you emimmolate it in your community. >> Excellent. Thank you so much, Amy. Lots to think about and certainly a lot to work on. I'm going to actually move us on over to Jessica's presentation and Jessica's going to dive more deeply in to Facebook, which is a great place to start if you have no social media presence. So thank you so much for being here, Jessica. I'll let you move us on. >> Thank you. I'm excited to talk about this. A few years ago, I was working at a public library and our Facebook page had a reach of like 30 people. I was wondering, is that normal? Is this worth my time? Is this something I can improve? So I did a lot of research and there's not much out there for libraries, but there are resources for small businesses. It turns out what work for them, works for our library. We also have a small staff. And we have limited time and zero to very small budget. So I used some of the tricks they were talking about and it made a huge difference in our feed. So from 30, which was our best. We were getting to 100 for post we were doing. There's a science behind Facebook. And excited to talk to you about it. We're going to talk about three objectives. Number one, Facebook's role in social media. The science behind it. Two discuss the different ways libraries can use Facebook for the best outreach, and then three I want to help you come up with a few resources you can use to stay on top of it all so that you can reach a lot of your goals without having to do a lot of work. There's a huge push for libraries to be on social media and I think that makes a lot of sense. 86% of the U.S. population is on the internet. Eight out of ten of those are on Facebook. If you are looking for one place to be, Facebook is a good starting point. The other great thing about Facebook is they have the most people on daily, as you can see from the second chart. So they are on 15 minutes. So the question is how will you reach this potential audience with the time and resources that you have? So a lot of people think, well, I have a personal account. Should I just create an account for Facebook and I will know exactly what I need to do. That can't be further from the truth. Your personal account is very different than your page account. Your personal account is you as a person. You are following people. You have family and friends, other pages, other groups. And when you post something because you are a top priority people will see it. It doesn't matter how often you post. A page is different. You can't see other people's accounts. You can't connect with them. And so you are putting information out there and hoping that people will like it. So they are structured very differently. Now a personal account, like I said, top priority is family and friends. They also reserve a small portion of these posts for informing and entertaining post. That's where your library page post will come in. You are competing against all of the pages and groups they are following to try to show up in the small percent. The personal account, as you react they build up your newsfeed. What you like they will show you more about it. If it is something you don't like, you can hide or unfollow yourself. Page account is a lot different. You can post as much as you want but not all it gets through. organic reach is 2 to 6% of your followers. The more people that like your page the smaller your organic reach is. For those who have smaller followers, you can be happy about that that means you have more people seeing your post than the bigger pages. But because you're trying to get through with all of the other pages that are posting, you need to post often. It is really important. And those posts have to do well. If people like your posts you will get better reach. If they don't like your post, if they don't interact with it at all, your post will get less reach the next time you put it on there. It is important that you understand what an engaging post is and how to be social on Facebook. You have Facebook insights where you can measure result and hopefully tweak it to make it work to your advantage. It's not switching over. There we go. So, the average user gets 1500 posts a day in their feed. On average. So Facebook had to come up with an algorithm to figure out what would work best and what people want to see and all of the posts they are not interested in needs to fade away, otherwise people won't stay on Facebook that long. We crunched the four factors that are very important. Sorry. And it is important that you pay attention to those. It will help you with your future posts. So C for creator. Facebook pays attention to the person that is posting the content. So if there are three of you posting on Facebook and one person tends to get a lot of great results and a lot of other people get less great results the person that has the higher reach does better in the next post even though someone else does the same topic. It makes a big difference. Your post is important, too. It shows to a small percentage of people and if they really like it and are interacting well, they will show it to more people throughout that day. And the next time you post, they will show more of that post to people, to your followers. And then they found that people like certain posts better, some like status, photo or video. So if your post is a video they are more likely to show it to your followers that like videos or if you do an article the followers that like articles. You have to find out what works best for your follower and what most of them like. And resensecy is important. Facebook doesn't want to be old news. If your followers log in one a week and you posted six days ago they are never going to see any of your posts. These are four factors that they pulled out that we really know about. But Facebook actually looks at 100 ,000 other factors. So a lot of things that go in to the algorithm. So it's a lot of work. Once you get the science to it, it's going to be easier. For me, there are seven factors that I think are important that if you follow gives you a successful Facebook page. So for us, we found we could reach 100 organic reach that. Was our goal. The organic reach is down to 2 to 6% of your followers. If you are not hitting that but within 2 to 6% you are doing as well as other pages. I have found that libraries do better than businesses do. So if you can strive for 100, you will make it more worthwhile of your time. It just says consistent posting is really important. Least once a day but if you can do twice a day. We will talk about this more. But whatever you post it has to be engaging and something that people will respond to. So make sure your follower interaction is important. Do they like it? Share it? Comment on it? and if they comment on your page, make sure they respond back to it so they feel acknowledged and that you are part of the community. They are not just out there. It encourages them to comment again. Facebook tells people how fast you respond to messages. You want to make sure you are on top of it. You can have your Facebook setup so you get an E-Mail when someone messages so you can hop on and respond. Your images are really important. Facebook is big on both desk top and mobile. Using an image that works looks good for both of them. It is ideal so you look professional. And the easiest thing to do is your url. Facebook.com gives you Facebook.com/a bunch of random numbers and you can go to your settings and put your library name in to it so people can easily find you later on. So you can do this. It takes some time but once you get the science behind it you can stay on top of it. Jennifer, are you seeing any questions? >> Not right now. No. It has been a little quieter. They are listening very closely. >> Okay. So we will move on to nine ways that you can maximize your reach and try to hit that 100. Number one, you have to post often. We usually say once in the morning, something serious and then once in the evening something fun. Make sure you post every single day. Not just when you are in the office. Because, again, only a small percentage of your posts are getting through. You need to make sure that you are generating a lot so you are getting through to a lot of your followers. Now, this may seem overwhelming. You definitely want tonight to sign in every day and do this on the fly. So, like Amy said, having a content calendar is really important. Carve out time, sit down and schedule and plan what you are going to do for the next week or two. Try to plan things that you aren't creating yourself. Find other resources that you can reshare. That is still important if you are going to stay on top of this. We will talk more about that later. I also highly recommend signing up for Google Alerts. You can do it for your library name, for the town or city your library is in and it will let you know when things are posted about it. If you have an article published about your library, that's great content to use on social media and reshare. You know what is going on around your town, your area, you can post about that, too. Everyone who is following you are patrons and they live in the area and are interested in it. You can use that, as well. I highly automating your post and helps you stay on top of that. You live and die by clicks This is important to understand. Make sure your only posting engaging content. You don't want to post your press release. You don't want to post something that only interests a small sliver of your patrons, like an ESL class. You are not going to get a lot of responses from your followers so Facebook is not the place to put it. Make sure whatever you put on-line you will get a like, an emotion, share, clicks to read, watch later. And even if someone says they love your post, that scores higher than a general like. All of this really matters to your current post and how many people will see it. And then the next time you post it matters how many people Facebook will show it to. Now, a lot of people don't like to hear just about one person talking about themselves. Libraries are the same thing. We fall in to that. You can't just talk about ourselves. We need to share content on shared values. What do libraries share with their patrons, a love of reading. Information about authors, book hue moor, things going on in the community. These are things that you can post on your page and help you reach your goal of posting two things a day. In my library, articles were big. And from information and authors, especially new books,ic churrs known as book humor. Those are done well and helped to boost up our reach we have had. So what do we mean by an "engaging post." Sometimes you have to be creative with how you get the information out there. One example, the first one, there is only one like for the story time. The second picture that came out a few days later had 22 likes. There's a bill difference between the two. First one is like an ad. It has a generic picture. Really the only people who are likely to respond to this are caregivers who have a kid in the age 3 to 6 that is available on that Wednesday to come to the particular program. So it didn't do well. The second one talks about a program also but the picture has this cute adorable dog watching a kid learning to read. Suddenly people who had no reason to respond to a story time now had a reason to. So a lot of people loved the post and liked the post and it did really well. Make sure you post the right pictures and frame it in a way that will make people want to respond. If you can't find a way to do it, it doesn't belong on Facebook. will just post about the library, but you are hurting yourself. You need to post fun things because Facebook is a social media network. You need to be social on it. And the fun things are why people click and respond. You want to use it to help increase your reach. When you do have to post something that is important, say you are closed on a snow day, more people will see it because you kept your reach up really high. So this can mean you can post picture and encourage people to comment on it, sharing about their reading. It has a mascot. You can do it in fun, interesting ways that people have a chance to respond to it. A lot of people love pictures of kids and reading posts so use those to your advantage. You can also talk about bookworms and reading problems and a lot of funny things that you can reuse and post and always gets a great response from readers. Another thing you can do is talk about the history of your town or city and post pictures of it. If you can tag another page, like the historical society, you can automatically double your reach because the historical society and your followers get to see this. Another great thing about that particular post, you have a lot of pictures. People have to click through pictures which means they are interacting with your post. If you do a bunch of picture and put it in one post, you are helping yourself because you are encouraging people to react even if they don't like it after they click through the pictures. Lastly the holidays, try to do it in a fun way. People do a lot of creative things to celebrate the holidays and you can make your own or share someone else's. But a lot of patrons love that and will respond to it positively. And it keeps your reach up. Keeps you going. So don't kiss and tell. Don't use Facebook like a library bulletin board. Only post things on there that are social, that you know or hope will get in an interaction that can work for the general, the largest group you have posted on there. If you can do that, if you keep that frame of mind, you're going to see an increase in your reach and see it consistently stay up. Now, when we talk about engaging posts, we talked about posting about your programs. I don't recommend actually doing a post about a program. What you really want to use is your Facebook event. And you want to make that so -- Facebook treats it different. They did a great job making changes to it to make it relevant. Focus on your big events. Don't do the weekly ones because it can be overwhelming when people see too many events but what people can do is they can mark they are interested in it. Then it will show up on their Facebook calendar and when it is close to the date, Facebook will send them a reminder and you don't even have to do it. I know for my friends, whenever they do the children's event, I see it in the news feed and it reaches me and I can mark if I'm interested or not. It is a great, powerful tool that you can use again and again. It doesn't mean you can't post later, you can show a picture of how it went. But if you want to get the word out Facebook events is the place you want to be. The one problem I heard about this is that Facebook allows people to mark if they are going or not. Sometimes patrons have a hard time understanding that they haven't actually registered for the program. They have to go to your library's website and do that. It may take a little growing pains to do that. You can put messages on the event saying you need to make sure you register at the library to actually count for the registration numbers. But it is a powerful tool and I recommend using it that way. For the weekly program programs, do a general post, something that pulls at the heart strings and mention this is a weekly program. Feel free to join us. But you don't want to do every program that your library offers or people will stop following you. One of the best things you can do, especially for the person who doesn't have a lot of free time, is resharing content. This actually works to your benefit in so many ways. Because if you share something on Facebook that got high reach, you are going to get an automatic Facebook bump and a higher reach than you normally get because this post is proven quality content. People like this. People are interacting with it. They don't feel like it is Spam. Facebook loves that you are doing that. You need to work on a page feed, get posts from other libraries and then you can reshare those and fill up your calendar without having to take time to create every little thing that you post. We mentioned a page feed a few times. What you do is visit a page. Click on the down arrow on like and you can like it as your page. When you go to your home page, to your library page, under how many people are following you is your page feed. Which I marked with the yellow arrow pointing to it. When you click on that that brings you to the second image that shows you all of the pages that you like and their newsfeed and what they are posting about. I noticed in the other presentation, a lot of you were saying, let's follow each other's libraries, you will want to do it this way and follow them as your page, not as a person because if you are following them as a person, and you don't respond to their posts, then you are hurting them because then their percentage is going down of how many people like their post. But you can't like a post, like or comment on a post as your page. So it is okay to do it through the page feed. It is not going to hurt their numbers. I recommend doing it that way. Now, in your Facebook insights, you have an option of pages to watch. The ones that you see are doing well and keep doing content that you want to share, you want to put them in to this category. And then when you click on their name on the hyper link, it will bring you to the image on the right and you can see what the top posts are for the week. It's easy to get quality content really fast. Now, I underlined the timestamp which is under their name. That will give you a url you can use to share a link later. It is not going to help you if you are trying to plan out for the week but the timestamp is super important. I started a share book clip Facebook group. We have over 2 ,000 people who are in this group, 2 ,000 libraries. And basically we share our top performing posts. If they are generic, you are welcome to share it on your own page. If it is specific to that library, it maybe a good learning opportunity. Like I know one library posted about this kid left behind a stuffed animal. And they did a cute -- can you help us find the owner thing and it went viral for them. If you happen to get that later, now you know what to do and you can use that strategy for your own page. Now here on the Facebook group, you don't want to click the timestamp because if you do and you share that post, you are going to get the library posting about how wonderful this posting has done. You don't want to share that part. It is important that you click on the word "post" as you will see right there. And that will bring you to the original post where you see add with pumpkin spice. And that's what you want to do on your page. The other thing is it is good for crowd sourcing ideas. If you don't know what to do for a holiday, you can see what other people are doing and get inspired or share back and forth on what things you can use. We talked about a lot of what you can do on your page and hoping that it gets through to people. There's things you can do to reach out, as well. You can can't do it as your page but as your personal account you can join Facebook groups for your local schools and town and city. I recommend doing that. A lot of people are on Facebook. As you saw from the beginning. And you get to learn what's going on around you and you can use it to your advantage. Like in our city, we have business Mondays. So on Mondays you can post about library programs and things going on and that would be totally okay. And you get to know what is going on and the town, too. For schools, they are a great way to reach parents. I was a teen librarian and we had a writing competition and we tripled how many people participated because we advertised in the local schools Facebook groups. It was a way to reach parents who encouraged their teens to participate. Use it to your advantage don't do it too often but you can talk about summer reading or your big problems during the breaks of the year and it would be a good way to reach people who don't normally come to the library. Another thing to do to get a lot of like on the page, you can click on the name and the number of likes on a particular post. It brings you to a picture I pulled up right here. You get to see how many of those people are following your page. You can invite them to actually like your page. It might be a way to increase followers on people who actually like your content but haven't taken that extra step to go and like it. Now, if they already like your page, you will notice it says liked and is grayed out. So you might find some people are listed as an invite. You are like wow, I they liked all of my posts. I'm pretty sure they are following me. And they probably are. But if it is locked down it won't tell you that. Facebook will let you invite them once so you don't have to worry about Spamming anyone. This technique only works for pages up to 100 ,000 followers. So if you are beyond that you can't do that. It only works with posts that have a lot of likes. If only one or two people like it won't give you that option. But if it puts them together you can have that option. A lot of libraries found it useful and it has worked for them. I know we don't want to spend money advertising, but I have heard great things about advertising on Facebook. So if you want to give it a shot it may be worth your time. It is not expensive and you can limit to age group, location, even a gender if you have a particular program that you are doing. You can really reach your target group fast, a lot better than posting in a lot of other places. Say you boost a post. You can go to the post that got a lot of likes and do what we just said for number two and invite the nonfans to follow and like your page. So you can use that to your advantage. >> Jessica, someone asked if that invite to the request -- the request to invite, does it show up as your page or as you as an individual, the invite? >> It shows up as your page. That's the good news. It pops up as a notification. They will get a notification next time they log in that this page had asked them to like them. However, there is, I believe, if you are friends with that person it will default to you. But if you are not friends with that person it would be your page. >> Okay. >> Good question. So a few months ago, Facebook allowed you to connect your groups to a particular page. It is kind of awesome. Groups is something I think libraries should look in to and consider. They get a higher priority on the newsfeed than their page does. Notifications will appear sometimes from a group. They will get periodic notifications about things you are posting. It will give you a chance to divide up your audience. If you want to do a children's group, a teen group, an adult group or maybe you want to do one focused on a particular program like a book group or whatever, you can share things that is specific to them that you think they would like to see. You wouldn't have to post every day because groups don't need that to be relevant in people's news feed. You can comment and like as your page. So people don't know who they are. They don't have to wonder why is Jess responding to everything. You can look professional. The newest thing is events can create and schedule posts ahead of time. So you don't have to do the group page whenever you want to post. You can get it done earlier. This might be the wave of the future. I'm hearing that Facebook is decreasing organic reach and doing an experiment where all Facebook pages are going to be in a different newsfeed and only those paid will be in the general newsfeed. This might be something that libraries would want to consider if they do end up going that road so that they can be active on Facebook without having to pay money every time you want to reach people. Words really matter on Facebook. Their algorithm pays attention to it. You want to avoid specific words like buy, sale, click, win. All of those are marked as Spamming. Facebook doesn't want to do that. Make sure you are creating in how you word it so you don't get a decrease in your reach. However, Facebook highlights your milestones. You can talk about work anniversaries, author birthdays, you can hit retirements and using those words will give you an automatic boost. I know in December we will be talking about looking at your statistics, analytics and the webinar. I highly recommend you all sign up for that. It is important for increasing your outreach. I want to make sure we talked a little bit about it today. The number one thing you need to do is try a variety of content. You know, one of the big factors is the post type that you are using. You need to find out what is the majority of your followers actually liking and those are the ones that you try to get and that you see a lot. And times of day make a big difference. It could be the mornings do better than nights. So you need to plan and decide how you want to do your posts. And then the length of the post and the character count, video, time, those all make a difference whether or not people pause and read what you are posting or ignore it and keep going through. You need to spend a month or two trying a bunch of things and seeing what works and using that to your advantage later. Now your Facebook insights could be helpful. They like to tell you how many of your followers are on per day and what time of the day they tend to be on. I have never found it helpful. For me this is what my pages look like. Basically the same number of people are on every day and from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., the same number of people on. So trying to experiment and see what works for you really helps. I can tell you, a lot of people say 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. is the most popular time people are on Facebook. However, if you post during that time, you have a higher amount of competition against all of the other pages. So you may not get through the competition if you post. If you post in the morning before people wake up you may hit the people that hop on-line and quickly look through Facebook before they start their day. You want to experiment and see what works for you. The one that works well for me is they give you statistics on your posts and tell you how well it has done. Your reach, they tell you the day. So you can see, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, the time, the type of post. And that is where you will find what is working. Sometimes you have a great post but you posted it at the wrong time of the day. Don't worry when you are experimenting about reusing them. And see if it made a difference if I did it at this time and pay attention to the numbers and because you are only getting a small percentage of your posts out, you can go back here for okay, can I refuse any of this content a month or two months later? Because you will reach different people each time. Don't be fearful about that, as well. So do you have any question other questions, Jennifer? >> Wow, there's been a lot going on. I just posted a link to the libraries and social media Facebook group because I know that a lot of the questions that have come up today do show up and are on that group for sure. But there was just a quick question about hashtags on Facebook. Do they work similarly to Twitter, and have you found success using hashtags on Facebook? >> I don't think it's really catched on Facebook. You can and I know some people have said it worked well for them and some people said it hasn't. I guess it depends on how savvy your crowd is. You can try it. >> I will say there was an earlier post to chat about using each day of the week for a sort of different types of content. I know a lot of libraries use hashtags for Tuesdays trivia or things like that. And I know there's some general hashtags that may be that would show up in general hashtag feeds that unless you have them specific to your library, those are going to show up in the broader hashtag world on Facebook. But I do know some libraries are using -- like one of the libraries in the social library that I posted today has a Lego club and they have a specific hashtag to their lie blare brair's Lego club. Thinking about either making those hashtags specific to your library and using it as a way for your community to quickly leverage the opportunity to have that feed from the hashtag show up. That's one way. And someone said this is a huge amount of information and I am now really glad that we've put a month, at least a month between each of our webinars. I really encourage people to take a look at the learner guide or any of the other tools as a way to dive deeper in between sessions. Pick a few, a handful of steps that may be will move you forward. We actually had some activities in the session that we didn't have time for in terms of prioritizing. I'm going to jump ahead here. There was one activity that we had here of selecting some of these ways to use media that many of the folks that responded in the survey would like to explore more. For instance, leveraging hashtags. Think of the things you could focus in between sessions as a way to take baby steps. Some of you have more advanced questions and I encourage you to tap in to the group on Facebook as a way to connect. And certainly make sure you are registered for the remaining two webinars. The next session will focus on analytics and I know a lot of questions that came up today relate to analytics and the ways to leverage analytics to both get your administration's buy in, to demonstrate how you are spreading the word, the different ways in which you are using Facebook as I said, we continue to collect your input on the social media and library survey, which we hope will be a valuable tool for you all to bring your story and your needs to your community. So, again, that's another great way. I will put the link to the page that will launch you to the survey in there, as well. Both sessions will be available as a part of this recording. And also -- oh, sorry, both presenters content will be available as part of the recording I will let you know when that is posted. And also we will send you all a certificate for joining today's session within a week. So keep your eyes out for that. And again, any of our webinars are always recorded and made available to your fellow learners of who maybe weren't able to join with us today and we look forward to seeing you next time on November 30th. I'll also mention that as you leave today, I'll send you a short survey. The survey will help us to guide our ongoing series and programming and provide feedback to our presenters and again, thank you so much to our presenters, Jessica and Amy for being here today and for bringing all of your great work to this series and a special thanks to Molly, who will be joining us next time as a presenter. And thank you, again, to TechSoup for joining us on this series and we look forward to seeing what you all bring to your social media presence and the great work your libraries are doing. Thank you all very much. And thanks again to our captioner, as well. Everyone HAVE an excellent rest of the week.