The Open University Library - Conversations with Students
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CILIP PPRG Marketing Excellence Awards 2014 - bronze award winner
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The Open University Library - Conversations with Students
- 1. Conversations with students: raising awareness through social media Claire Jopson, Communications and Promotions Officer Debbie Sheehy, Business Support Officer 14th November 2014
- 2. Presentation outline • OU background • Introduction to the online library • Project summary • Objectives • Tools • Project impact • Low cost • Lessons learned and taking it to the next level • Any questions
- 4. 85% surveyed in the 2014 National Student Survey agree library resources and services are good enough for their needs Resource richness 474 databases, 90,000 electronic journals and over 500,000 ebooks 2.4 million visits to Open Research Online. The Open University's open access repository of research publications 52,000 Unique visitors to the OU Library website per month Award winning Digital and information literacy tools for students 1st UK HE to provide a 24/7 webchat service
- 6. Promotional objectives Increase student exposure to library content (i.e. videos and educational resources) in social media posts Improve student engagement and conversation on social media Move further away from using social media as an informational resource to one that was conversational, and developed relationships with students. Post content to social media platforms 3-5 times a week To evaluate the impact of posting regular content on student engagement and return on investment
- 7. Tools used
- 8. Infographic
- 9. Social media trends #throwbackthursday
- 10. Competitions
- 11. Impact
- 12. Increased engagement with resources
- 14. Budget
- 15. Lessons learned
- 16. Moving forward
- 17. Any Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Hi, I’m Debbie and this is my colleague Claire and we are part of the Library Communications Team at The Open University in Milton Keynes. We’re going to talk to you this morning about our award-winning project, Conversations with students: raising awareness through social media
- start by showing you how different our students are in the way they study from a traditional campus-based university and how the online library supports students to give you the project context, so you’ll see why social media is such an important tool for us to use. Then Claire is going to talk you through: project and its aims, how we Used different tools to increase our reach and how we engaged students in conversations Talk you through budget to show how using social media doesn’t require a large marketing budget to see a great return on investment - this ties in nicely with a presentation which is coming up later in the programme, marketing on a shoestring I’ll come back and tell you about how we evaluated the content we were posting so that we could learn from the results made some informed decisions about the most effective way to engage with students moving forward opportunity for you to ask questions at the end
- The OU is the largest academic institution in the UK We are very different from a traditional university, our students rarely come onto campus, they are studying at a distance from all over the world, don’t often get to talk to students face to face Over 200,000 students Of which in 2012/13, 13,227 students studied directly with the University overseas Over 10,000 staff – nation and region centres
- With the advent of the internet the OU was able to develop what is today a world class online library to support students at a distance To give you an idea of the breadth and scale of the OU Library, this slide shows you a few facts and figures: Richness of resources (474 databases) Over 90,000 peer-reviewed ejournals (compared with 2,000 print journals in the physical library) Over 500,00 ebooks (compared with 200,00 print books) 1st UK HE institution to provide a 24/7 webchat service, Students can ask a librarian a question any time night or day via our library webchat QuestionPoint, partner with US and Australian HE institutions to answer webchat through the night when students are still studying! always looking for new and innovative ways to support our unique student body so when social media grew rapidly in popularity in from around 2005 the OU Library became an early adopter and in 2008 set up its own Library Facebook and Twitter pages – it gave us another platform to engage with students at a distance (FB founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006) now going to hand over to Claire whose going to talk to you about the strategy we adopted to increase our reach using social media based on informed decision-making
- The aim of the campaign, ‘Conversations with students: raising awareness through social media’ was to increase awareness and use of OU Library services and resources amongst Open University students and increase their levels of engagement using social media. This ran March – August 2014 Target group: The target group was Open University registered students. This is a varied demographic of approximately 200-250,000 distance learners who (as Debbie said) are unlikely to visit the physical library and instead require access the online library. Age range, qualification background and location of the target group is also extremely diverse. Social media isn’t new to us, had both Twitter and FB accounts for 7-8 years but we wanted to approach it differently and move from it being simply an informational one-sided source To achieve this, the project focused on creating more varied and targeted communications to students using new engagement tools.
- Sense of community
- So, how did we go about achieving these objectives? Looked at more innovative, eye-catching and engaging ways to communicate with students, some of which I’ll look at in more detail in the next couple of slides, but a few smaller examples were: Prezi presentations Use of internal and external hashtags – i.e. OU Student Increased use of images – we now use an image on every post we put up (aside from Twitter, character dependent) Research shows that using an image with a post can increase engagement 30-35% increase Collaboration with OU accounts i.e. main University account, Careers Service and Students’ Association – encouraged sharing.
- Infographic: presenting data in a more visual and engaging way – how could we deliver our message with statistics and facts without boring them? Software - Piktochart
- We joined in with social media trends to capture a wider audience I.e. linked OU Archive material that’s housed in the library to #throwbackthursday with a little history to the material i.e. mcarthy microscope Received very well linking in with trends
- Cat naming competition! Aim was to increase student engagement and awareness of library videos by asking them to suggest a name for Bob (animation’s) new cat. Nearly 2,000 suggestions! This helped to then launch our new animation – using your mobile on the go - to a more engaged audience.
- The project proved very successful in both improving awareness of the Library and its resources/services and in increasing engagement with students on social media. Social media All posts on social media were regularly monitored to ascertain impact, using a new reporting dashboard called Sprout Social Over the course of the project we reached a milestone of over 15,000 followers on Facebook. This met with our promotional objective to increase student exposure to library content. Another impact this project has had, just a few months on, we have nearly 17,000 followers – even though project was only for 6 months, the growth has continued exponentially Follower summary: Facebook – increase of 1,104 followers of the 6 months and 339 on Twitter Increased use of library services and resources e.g. FAQ Friday: a link to a ‘Being Digital’ activity on referencing showed a 443% increase in traffic to the site over the following 7 days after promotion, with a 57% referral rate from social media. - The following screenshots are examples of social media posts that were particularly successful in engaging students and increasing awareness of the online library, in line with our objectives. The techniques we used to deliver content in a more conversational and exciting way proved particularly successful and are techniques that we will continue to carry forward
- Aim was to promote library resources by linking International Women’s Day to the Jennie Lee collection, part of the University Archive held in the OU Library This time last year we promoted archive content on FB and it got very little engagement 7,852 people saw the post 329 likes, comments and shares International Women’s Day: a link to an archive collection on the Library website showed a 3,100% increase in traffic to the website over the following 7 days, with a 94% referral rate from social media Unlikely if we had just promoted it alone that it would have received as much engagement.
- Used this to show not every post we used was to promote a resource. It was also important to just provide light-hearted and conversation content to students. The aim was to boost conversation by asking students what book they would save if all books were to disappear tomorrow except one. 4,464 people saw the post 155 likes, comments and shares 32 comments/book suggestions from students Debbie will now take you through the more administrative details of the project.
- Team: The marketing and communications team is a small team of three. Only two members of the team are responsible for posting and monitoring content on our social media platforms. Staff time: On average each of the two staff members spend 3 hours a week creating content and engaging with students on social media. This incurs a theoretical cost of up to £122 per week.
- The project highlighted the need for us to improve our monitoring and reporting of social media, particularly in tracking follower growth. Since nearing completion of the project and moving to a more sophisticated reporting dashboard (Sprout Social) we have been able to put in place more effective and comprehensive monthly monitoring, which we can now carry forward after project completion. Being able to monitor and report on which type of posts receive most engagement will enable us to make more informed decisions about how to engage with students in the most effective way. Not always buying new things but using what you've got, using online No cost, looking at content we've already got, staff time, great return on staff time, only incurred 7 percent of staff time, small part of our role part of our Communications Plan, doesn’t sit outside it, just us don't need huge team managing digital marketing
- More systematic posting on social media from analysis of peak times/popular posts e.g. keeping weekdays to more light hearted and using evenings and weekends to promote more academic/study materials From research we know students are more likely to be studying at the weekend rather than in the week Looking at ways to make more personalised i.e. signing off as individual team members rather than ‘Library Services’ Increase the conversational elements of posts e.g. if you were on a sinking ship, which one book would you save and why?