We’ve upped our social game this academic year since an inspiring LACUNY talk in September 2013. On our library’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we follow a schedule of Mug Shot Mondays and Throwback Thursdays (#tbt), with other posts peppered in between. #tbt has been super successful on Facebook, in terms of views and clicks, especially since the main college account often re-shares our posts.
Facebook insights December 2013 to January 2014 (I took a 3-week break, hence sporadic posts). Blue bar = clicks on content; pink bar = Likes, comments, and shares
Our posts have been genuine geek-outs (how cool are these old photos!), but they’ve also been diagnostics and test runs. The students don’t know it yet, but we’ll be leveraging the popularity of our weekly posts to promote our upcoming Digital Collections site and next year’s 50th Anniversary Exhibit. What works? What doesn’t work?
We’re realists — we know that our visual posts are probably one “oh, that’s cool” blip in our students’ Facebook feeds. But as optimists, we always include a relevant link (often in a subscription database) and a source link (to our Special Collections pages), with the hope that we’ll serendipitously inspire further research and interest in our unique materials.
A successful Throwback Thursday post
Facebook’s insights page can give us a pretty good idea of whether people are clicking through to the links we provide. If the link goes to a page on our servers, Google Analytics will also record that click-through. But there’s one more way that I like to track the effectiveness of our links.
Using bit.ly to track success of social media posts
Bit.ly admin page
You can’t see it in the screenshot above, but Colonel Sandusky’s bio from the Facebook photo post got 5 clicks. The shortlink to our Archives page has 42 clicks total, from all of our Archives-related Facebook posts.
Three advantages of Bit.ly:
The shortlinks (e.g., bit.ly/jjpexp) look nice in short posts, especially compared to our enormous EZproxy links
If you need to include a long link on a poster or slide, a shortlink will make your viewers happy
With an account, you can see how often a bit.ly link has been clicked
Three drawbacks to Bit.ly:
You can’t export a spreadsheet, to my knowledge, so you’d have to cobble together data if you want a big-picture view. But for a quick peek, it works great
You can’t submit a link more than once. So our Archives link has 40+ clicks on 5+ posts
If you click on the link yourself, even from the admin view, that adds a click to your stats, giving you a distorted view
Two tips for using Bit.ly:
See the pencil next to the short link? That means you can customize the link! As you can see, ours in the above image are jjnewslet, jjdcpeek, jjhamby, and mapcrime. Much more human-friendly than something like 1Xoj5nW. (Please customize your shortlink if you’re putting it on a slide or poster!) Yikes! »»» Much better.
Edit the link’s title and/or add a note on your admin view to remind yourself where/why each link is listed. Do this especially if your link has an EZproxy prefix, otherwise every link will be title “Log in with your xxxx username…”
Drawing preliminary conclusions, even our most popular Facebook posts don’t bring in many click-throughs. A little disappointing, but that’s to be expected. People use Facebook when they want to be distracted and scroll quickly through brief diversions, not necessarily when they want to dive deeply into a topic.
Views and clicks are only one measure of success in social media. These numbers are the easiest to track and give the quickest gratification after the effort you put in. But true outreach means increased use and improved perception of the library, which is much harder to quantify at a granular level. (Suggestions?)
I’ll keep updating with other tales and tips for success in social media in our library. Other tips and examples are welcome!
Update January 29, 2015: I revised this post to add a 4 more tips. We’re heavy Instagram users now; we post 2+ times a week when school is in session; we geotag and hashtag each post; we know the other IGers on campus; and we take the time to like/comment on other organizations’ posts, and even students’ posts, with the result of gaining followers and goodwill. Since this was originally posted, we gained 5x the number of followers we originally had. Moreover, I informally surveyed freshmen throughout the last semester. All of them are on Instagram all the time. And all of them laughed when I asked if they used Facebook. (They don’t.) So IG is where it’s at.
Update November 6, 2013: We’re on a pretty good posting schedule now: #tbt Throwback Thursdays (Special Collections photos related to the history of John Jay and criminal justice), and another photo from around campus earlier in the week to spice things up. These photos get good traction on Instagram and an even better response when they’re also posted to Facebook. I was told by someone in our marketing department that it is “thrilling to be in touch with someone who gets social media.” Go us!
Jennifer Poggiali, a librarian at Lehman College, spoke at last Friday’s LACUNY Reference Roundtable and gave a great overview of using social media in the library. Realistically, what’s worth putting time into at this point? What works? What doesn’t work?
At John Jay, we’ve tried our hand at several social media accounts. Facebook is the biggie, of course—we’ve got 700+ followers, the majority of whom are John Jay students. We advertise library goings-on and link to articles that might be relevant to John Jay students’ work. On Twitter, we’ve got 200+, but not many are students. There’s a lot of other John Jay departments or CUNY libraries following us. (Side note: Twitter was a very important communication channel during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, though. We were the only John Jay account tweeting and could give students information and answer questions about school closings and city resources.)
As an avid ‘grammer myself, I set up the @johnjaylibrary Instagram account last winter and have been exploring how to use it for outreach with a some success. We’ve got just over 40 followers as of September 2013, a small but growing number. [Update January 2015: we now have over 200 followers.] Many of them seem to be John Jay students, alongside other libraries and the usual gaggle of randos that any social media account attracts. We’re not there yet, but I’ve been sort of bumbling around. With better strategies, it could be a really effective outreach tool.
Good examples of cultural organizations using Instagram
One of Jennifer’s recommendations was to have fun running a social media account. When I look at organizations that I personally follow on Instagram, it’s clear that the people in charge are having a good time. The Mutter Museum ‘grams delightfully disgusting medical history photos and has a #GuessTheDeath contest every week. The Public Art Fund clearly loves what they do, and sometimes you get a grinning selfie of the staffers working on the installations. (Their Twitter account also does a weekly trivia giveaway. I myself won an awesome hat and book one week!) The U.S. Department of the Interior has an incredible (and incredibly popular) Instagram account, posting beautiful photos once or twice a day. The effort put into obtaining and posting the photos with such frequency is a good indication of their belief in their mission. And NASA is probably the most popular educational account I’ve seen so far. They’ve got 200k+ followers and write up a couple explanatory paragraphs about each photo they post.
9 strategies to try on Instagram
Weekly specials. #GuessTheDeath gets a lot of people pumped up about the Mutter Museum and inspires creative responses. We can’t really do something so grisly here because we need to be careful not to glorify crime. But #tbt Throwback Thursdays are easy and are always a big hit for collecting institutions. Each Thursday, we post a photo of John Jay from yesteryear. Example. [Update fall 2014: For a semester, we also had a #MugshotMondays series. Although I took care to caption the photos with scholarly seriousness, a descendent of one of our featured criminals took offense and emailed us, so we stopped.]
Highlight visually striking and/or historical significant items. The good visual stuff is in our Special Collections, half of which are in a restricted-access location that doesn’t get a lot of love. Sharing widely on the web provides a teeny-weeny bit more access. And as educators, we love to educate! The good exemplars above include short paragraph contextualizing the item. NASA tends to be pretty straightforward (being scientists and all), which is sensible, but depending on the item, being a little tongue-in-cheek like the Mutter or Public Art Fund might be fun. Example with a very short blurb from John Jay.
Pull back the curtain. Most of my colleagues are camera-shy, but taking photos of the people who run the show (and even of willing, happy patrons!) gives an organization a goodwill vibe. When users look at the grid of thumbnails, are they only seeing old books, or are they seeing a good representation of what (and who) the library really is? Example.
Spread the love. Remember, your students are proud to be here! Spread the collegial love, even if it’s not library-specific. On Facebook, the Instagram photo that was by far the most popular was just of the college name and some American flags. It’s corny, but it contextualized the library as an active and proud part of campus. In addition, our account ‘likes’ photos other John Jay students take that are relevantly hashtagged or geotagged to the library. (But photos it wouldn’t be creepy to ‘like’, obviously.) Many students will post photos of themselves on their first day of class, or the first day of finals, and so on — it’s easy to leave a cheerful ‘Welcome!’ or ‘Good luck!’ comment. Example of a Veterans Day post.
Hashtag like crazy. Within reason. I’m not saying #to #hashtag #every#thing. Locally, if you’re at an academic institution, there are many college-wide hashtags, like #johnjaycollege #jjay, plus you can tag any relevant student organizations, such as tagging @jjcstudents (student outreach) in workshop posts. Putting the library in the middle of college-wide imagery is outreach, too. Less importantly, when you use a combo of generic and specific hashtags (#rarebooks #incunabula), you definitely do get passersby viewing and liking your photo. It’s shot-in-the-dark outreach, but you’re putting your stuff out there to get views, and this is a facile way to promote your collections. Example. Library basics! We’ll show you where you can study, how to check out books, how to print stuff, and more. The first Library 101 workshop this semester is at 2pm tomorrow. No RSVP required — just come to the Reference Desk upstairs. #johnjaycollege #johnjaylibrary #jjay
Post posters. It seems silly, especially when you can’t really use links and Instagram is text-heavy… But to promote events like library workshops or readings, put together a professional-looking “poster” in Photoshop with all the relevant info. Savvy students will screenshot it or google the library event later. Example.
Run little campaigns. Just like you might put posters across many areas of campus, so too you could post a variation on a theme throughout the week. Examples 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for our 24-hour library week.
Use emoji. Everyone loves emoji, and you’ll look like a pro. Cross-phone, cross-browser support is increasing. Example.
Get to know other social media folks on campus. That way you can cross-post each others’ information, boosting impressions and being good campus neighbors. Example of a shared post on Facebook — it doubled the number of people reached and pinpointed a student group that would greatly benefit from the workshop.
I’ll be trying some/all of these things in the coming weeks. It will take a good chunk of time to be really tactical about it.
Using Instagram for informal assessment of student experience
Assessment is the thing these days. Maybe it’s just a frequency illusion in my case, but I keep seeing assessment cropping up as a major priority in libraries.
One library assessment method is student photo journals, for instance those used in ERIAL, as my colleague Janice pointed out. This method could involve asking students in the library to borrow a camera and take photos of two things they like and dislike, or asking them open-endedly to take photos of their experience that day in the library.
But at this point, with a smartphone in most students’ hands, they’re photo journaling every day! Check your geotagged location on Instagram to see what students think worthy of ‘gramming. Here at the John Jay Library, it’s piles of books students are about to tackle; Starbucks lattes next to laptops with Word documents open; grinning students goofing off in the group study rooms; and so on. It’s one glimpse into what the library means to them.
[Posted by a student] “Study time #in #library #John #Jay! Some #research #yay #instastudy #instamood #ufffff!”[Posted by a student] “Can’t focus on reading Aristotle it’s so confusing my head hurts #lifeofacollegestudent #geeklife”
I know this dead horse has been beaten. But here are some reminders about things that slip through the cracks.
Every once in a while, google the name and alternate names of your organization and check the universal (not personal) results.
Google results page: before (Note: this is my best approximation. Was too distressed to take a screenshot)I did this a while ago and was shocked to discover that the one image that showed up next to the results was of someone injecting heroin into their arm! Oh my god! As it turned out, one of our librarians had written a blog post about drug abuse research and that was a book cover or illustration or something. None of us knew about it because why would we google ourselves? Well, now we google ourselves.
Claim your location on Google+.
Click the “Are you the business owner?” link (pink in screenshot at right). You’ll have to verify before you can make a basic page. But in doing so, you will have some control over the photos that show up next to the place name. For example, I posted some of my better library photographs to our Google+ page, and they soon replaced the heroin arm.
Demote sitelinks as necessary.
Sitelinks are the sub-categories that show up beneath the top search result. In our case, it’s things like ‘Databases’ and ‘How to find books’ — appropriate for a library. But there were also some others, like ‘Useful internet links’ (circa 2003) that were no longer being updated, so once verified as webmasters, we demoted them.
Check out your reviews.
Since place-based search is the thing now, you’d better keep tabs on your Foursquare, Google, and other reviews pages. For one thing, it’s great to identify pain points in your user experience, since we are now trained to leave passive-aggressive complaints online rather than speak to humans. Example: our Foursquare page has a handful of grievances about staplers and people being loud. Okay, so no surprise there, but we’re trying to leave more positive tips as the place owners so that people see The library offers Library 101 workshops every fall when they check in, not Get off the damn phone! (verbatim).
Add to your front-page results.
If there are irrelevant or unsatisfactory search results when you look up your organization, remember that you have some form of control. Google loves sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, etc., so establishing at least minimal presences on those sites can go far.
Meta tags.
Okay, so this is SEO 101. But I surprised myself this morning when I realized, oh dear, we don’t have a meta description. The text of our search result was our menu options. Turns out Drupal (and WordPress) don’t generate meta tags by default. You’ll have to stick them in there manually or install a module/plug-in. Also, you’ll want to use OpenGraph meta tags now. These will give social sites more info about what to display. They look like this:
<meta property="og:title" content="Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="website"/>
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="The Lloyd Sealy Library is central to the educational mission of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. With over 500,000 holdings in social sciences, criminal justice, law, public administration, and related fields, the Library's extensive collection supports the research needs of students, faculty, and criminal justice agency personnel."/>
All right, good luck. Here’s hoping you don’t have photos of explicit drug use to combat in your SEO strategy.
P.S. If you use the CUNY commons, try the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. It is really configurable, down the post-level.
I’m a big fan of Evernote, as anyone who’s ever asked me for app recommendations can attest. In my quest to never ever use Microsoft Word, Evernote has not only enabled this, but has changed the way I do my work.
It’s marketed as a kind of scrapbook that will stay alive forever. They advocate many uses for it, like a food journal, movie log, vacation planner, research helper, and more. Back in good old 2011-12, I used it to organize and compose grad school assignments; now that I’m employed (hooray) it’s become indispensable for organizing projects — see the image at left for my most frequently used notebooks to get a sense of the organization possible. As a librarian, I compulsively categorize everything in my life.
See that “Done today” notebook? That’s been the best way to keep myself motivated, on track, and productive. It’s my professional journal, where every morning I list out that day’s mini-goals, long-terms goals I’m working on, and tasks I completed. It’s easy to lose track of what, exactly, you do all day, when you don’t have a visualization or documentation.
So for example, here’s how one February day’s entry read:
I use my Apple devices in varying levels of light: in my bright office, huddled in bed, and at underlit conference presentations. I’ve found that the Invert Colors accessibility feature is incredibly helpful in dimmer situations, both to save my eyes from being blinded and to relieve people around me from the distraction of a bright screen. Even at the lowest brightness level, a white screen is pretty glaring.
Same screen, inverted
Keyboard shortcut in Mac: in OS X versions previous to Mountain Lion, the Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+8 shortcut is already enabled. In 10.8.3+, you have to go to System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Accessibility, where you can turn on the Invert Colors shortcut.
Home button shortcut in iOS: Settings » General » Accessibility » scroll to bottom, set Triple-click Home to Invert Colors.
And if you really want to mess with people when they’re not looking, invert their screen color and crank the zoom waaay up. If abusing your friends is not reason enough to get yourself familiar with accessibility features, I don’t know what is.
Actual size (click to enlarge and scare yourself). Screen follows mouse. System Preferences » Accessibility » Zoom
Lastly, if you’re looking to relieve your eyes in normal lighting throughout the day, I highly recommendf.lux, which adapts your display according on the time of day (lighter in the morning, warmer/softer at night).
Need help with the Commons?
Email us at commonshelpsite@gmail.com so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
Yikes! »»» 
Much better.
![[Posted by a student] “Study time #in #library #John #Jay! Some #research #yay #instastudy #instamood #ufffff!”](https://emerging.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2013/09/studentpic3.png)
![[Posted by a student] "Can't focus on reading Aristotle it's so confusing my head hurts #lifeofacollegestudent #geeklife"](https://emerging.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2013/09/studentpic2-300x181.png)
