Sharing the Love: Working with the Community to Create Engaging Social Media Content
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Angela M. Vanden Elzen, Reference & Web Services Librarian, Lawrence University Holly Roycraft, Library Secretary, Lawrence University Many challenges arise when managing a library’s social media presence, though the biggest is often generating engaging and interesting content. At Lawrence University’s Mudd Library, we’ve begun the shift from trying to create content our target audience wants, to asking them to generate it for us. We’ll share how we have been able to work with other campus departments, students, alumni, and faculty to provide concrete examples of what the library can do for our patrons- and how we have been using social media to share these stories. Attendees will be highly encouraged to share their own social media stories.
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Sharing the Love: Working with the Community to Create Engaging Social Media Content
- 1. Sharing the Love: Working with the Community to Create Engaging Social Media Content Holly Roycraft | Administrative Assistant Angela Vanden Elzen | Reference & Web Services Librarian Lawrence University, Appleton, WI
- 2. Overview A bit about us Identifying Your Community Working With Your Community Community-Centered Content Community-Created Content Browsing for Content Your Library’s Community Sharing the library love!
- 3. Seeley G. Mudd Library Staff of 15 About 48 student workers
- 4. Social Media We Use Facebook Tumblr Instagram Twitter Flickr, Pinterest, Vine
- 5. Our Team: Different Perspectives! Allison current student Holly Staff Member Angela Librarian and Faculty Member Kasey Campus Social Media Specialist
- 6. Identifying Your Community Academic Library (Campus as Community) Campus Departments Academic Departments Alumni Patrons Students Faculty/Staff Locals Public Library Other libraries Library-related pages Other public service departments within your municipality Local Businesses Patrons Library staff and volunteers
- 7. Working with your Community: Liking and Sharing
- 8. Working With Your Community: Capturing Events
- 9. Working With Your Community: Attending Events
- 10. Working With Your Community: Expressing Gratitude
- 11. Working With Your Community: Feature Displays
- 14. Community-Created Content: Sharing is for Everyone!
- 15. Creating Content for the Community: It’s all about the give and take!
- 18. Community-Centered Content: Pay Attention to Patrons
- 19. Community-Created Content: Ask a Question
- 25. Community Generated Content: Alumni Librarians
- 26. Community Generated Content: Alumni Librarians
- 27. Community Generated Content Alumni Researchers
- 28. Browsing Community Content (totally not Facebook stalking) Professors posting about books in the library Students and professors talking about events and asking questions Tumblr- tracking hashtags Yik Yak- see what people are saying anonymously about the library (and try really hard to ignore the rest). This site is searchable What we look for:
- 30. Browsing Community Content: Joining Groups
- 33. Your Library’s Community: Meet the Staff
- 34. Your Library’s Community: Meet the Staff
- 35. Your Library’s Community: Meet the Student Staff
- 36. Your Library’s Community: Meet the Student Staff
- 37. Your Library’s Community: Student Researchers
- 38. Your Library’s Community: Student Research
- 39. Your Library’s Community: One good post deserves another
- 41. Your Library’s Community: Easel Pad
- 42. Your Library’s Community: Ask a Question!
- 43. Your Library’s Community: Librarians in Action!
- 44. Your Library’s Community: Librarians at Large!
- 48. Sharing the Library Love Look around the library with fresh eyes, paying close attention to who is using what.
- 49. What about you? Questions? Ideas? Inspiration? Ask this well-known user if she’d like to be featured in a post.
- 50. Let’s follow each other! Go to padlet.com/mudd/social and add your library’s social media addresses.
Editor's Notes
- Today I’m going to talk about the different ways a university library can work with the campus community to create engaging social media content, along with examples of how we’ve been able to get our community to help us generate content, and even generate the content for us. While I will be spending time talking about things we’ve done at the Mudd Library, I also intended for this session to be a place where attendees can share and ask questions, so please feel free to do so. Angela
- Quickly, here’s a bit about the Seeley G. Mudd Library. We are the only library on campus, we have a staff of 15- which includes 8 professional librarians and 7 paraprofessionals. We also have about 48 student assistants. Students have been SO important and helpful to us.
- These are the social media applications we use in the Mudd Library. We spend most of our efforts on Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram- but also contribute to Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest, and Vine
- We can’t stress enough how important varying perspectives on a social media team is. Each of us interact with different aspects of campus in different ways, and attend a wide variety of events. It’s all about connection, and the more collaborators, the more connections. Working together helps us think of campus from a wide perspective, and cover many viewpoints and topics in our content. As an example, before Allison started, we had a library Tumblr page, but did not know much about the culture of Tumblr, or what to post to it. She did a great job of getting the page up and running, and adds a lot of fun and interesting content to it. She also does a really great job of thinking of content that we wouldn’t know about, as she is able to follow developments in social media and internet culture and tailor content to them. It’s been so important to have a students perspective. Is there a younger volunteer or student in your library you could approach to do some social media work?
- Awareness of the differences between academic and public library, but the community model works for both, just different players Know your community! Pages with which to follow and interact. Some may seem obvious, but check to make sure you’re following pages that are pertinent. Like these pages: Other libraries (the easiest way to share the love is simply by re-sharing great posts) Library-related pages: BookRiot, BadgerLink, etc. Other public service departments within your municipality (police, mayor, water treatment, parks and recreation, etc.) Local businesses and their owners Patrons Library Staff and Volunteers
- This is admittedly the most obvious means of interacting with your community: Follow, share, like, comment and tag other pages This is a great way to increase your following and to get ideas about who to follow back. We’ve had great luck with tagging students in the library and having their friends follow us. Liking other pages, can also generate more followers. As you can see in the first picture, just liking Lawrence’s post created visibility. In the second we tagged Lawrence in a post, enabling not only all of our followers to see it, but all of Lawrence’s followers as well.
- The Archivist, whose office is in the library, gave a presentation to some grade school students. Shared by the LU page as well. This was a Win Win situation: we generated some content (a picture and some information, without having to do much background work), and Erin (and our library as a whole) got some great publicity for the work she does.
- We were invited to the Admissions office gratitude picnic. Not only was this a great opportunity for free lunch, but we brought our cameras and were able to make a post for our own social media channels. This included tagging the Admissions department (giving us some visibility on their page) and the Wriston Art Gallery (giving us some visibility on their page) where the picnic was held.
- The library purchased a cake from a small local business for Founder’s Day. We shared this picture on the bakery’s timeline (a local business) with a ‘thank you,’ and that post generated many likes and new followers from the larger community. We posted this on instagram and it was shared by Lawrence’s page as well.
- One department with whom we work frequently is the Wriston Art Galleries. An example is the Rabari objects display we turned into a blog post and Flickr album. We shared the blog post on our Facebook page, which they then shared on their page- resulting in more interactions. This would work well with your displays, too. Tag whomever curated the display, or tag contents of display, if possible.
- Perhaps simply sharing is obvious, but we have to mention it nonetheless. This is a Facebook post Angela spotted from Wriston Art Gallery of a photograph of a painting in their collection that was made by an alumna. Angela noticed that the artist is also the subject of a display we have in a case in the library. It was a great opportunity to share their post, add a little more information about the artist, and advertise our display. This helps us and them.
- This is outside of the campus community, but something that we have a lot of fun with is interacting with other libraries on social media. Here’s an example of a post we shared from the Appleton Public Library on Facebook about researching family history. Our music librarian was co-presenting at this event, so we thought our audience might be interested. This highlights the importance of following other library pages. It’s great to highlight the work of other libraries, too.
- This one was a fun interaction between the UW Milwaukee Archives and us. It might be difficult to see, but we first posted a picture of a Cumberbomb bookmark in our archives records- then the UWM archives posted a picture of one of the same bookmarks in their records. It was really silly, so of course we re-blogged their post onto our Tumblr.
- Angela! Women of Library History blog
- By following the Wriston Galleries on social media, we notices were frequently advertising for a series of exhibit tours called Art @ Noon. Our library has a great deal of art hanging throughout. I contacted the director of the Wriston Galleries about possibly doing a tour of the Kruse Room in the library, a space that contains a collection of particularly beautiful artwork that not many people on campus know about. The event was shared on Facebook along with photos from the event after it had taken place. The tour ended up being advantageous for both of us, as it led to some great content for us, and introduced a wider audience to the Art @ Noon series.
- Mudd Gallery The library is fortunate enough to have a small space in our building that we were able to turn into a gallery space, which is managed by the art department. This space provides many opportunities for creating social media content. Each exhibit usually will have an opening gathering, which is often advertised as a Facebook event that we share. The students often allow us to photograph them and their works of art, which provides us with engaging content for many social media channels. We also have the opportunity to share their content relating to the Mudd gallery.
- Pay attention to who is using your physical space and resources! Another example of creating content is when we catch faculty using our equipment. Assistant Professor of History, Jake Frederick, was overheard raving about our new digital microfilm scanner. He had been trying to read a microfilm scan of an 18th century document for years on standard microfilm readers, and was very happy to discover how readable our new digital microform reader made his film. We thought this would make for an excellent blog post about the new scanner. I’ve posted a snip of our not-yet-published blog post. Who might be using your services or materials that you could highlight? Notice that Jake provided us with a great quote. Can you get some patrons to do the same for you?
- A few years back, we began featuring Lawrence faculty on National Library Week posters. Usually we use the ALA theme, then decide who of our “regulars” will be a good fit for that theme. The first year we did this, we asked three faculty to share their favorite databases and photographed them using them. Another example of how reaching out to ask, and posing one simple question resulted in a lot of social media content, electronic signs, as well as posters to be hung around the library and campus. Great opportunity to advertise for library resources outside of the library, as we were able to hang these all over campus. They attracted a lot of attention, especially in the academic buildings in which the faculty teach. So, these were really helpful in paper, but they’ve also been very useful in social media. When it was National Library week, we posted jpgs of the advertisements on social media. Since then, I’ve edited the files and made them into slides for our electronic sign, and posted these edited files on our social media channels.
- You can see, this slide no longer mentions National Library Week. I altered it to simply be an advertisement for a database. We’ve posted them to Flickr and also have a Pinterest board of them, occasionally share them on other social media channels, and use them on our electronic sign in the library.
- Dean of the Conservatory, Brian Pertl advertised for DRAM (database of recorded American music) with his dog, Zeek the Conservatory Dog.
- The last one I’ll show is Professor of Chemistry Dave Hall, advertising for the iPads that are available from the library’s media center. This one was from this year’s library week.
- Same idea, but featuring a student
- This poster features Assistant Professor of Music History, Julie McQuinn, her dog Hank, and the library staff. She wanted to advertise how helpful the library staff is and how we help foster “learning, community, and collaboration.” Don’t be afraid to feature yourself, or a colleague. This is a great way to familiarize patrons with library staff.
- Another part of our community that has helped us create social media content is our alumni. Our Library Director, Pete Gilbert, had the idea of contacting former Lawrence students who went on to become librarians. This led to a fun series on our blog called alumni librarians. This was one of our first examples of not just getting people from the Lawrence community to go along with our ideas, but to actually do the work of writing up the content as well. The alumni wrote up a little about their experiences at the Mudd Library and Lawrence, how they got to where they are now, and a little about what they like best about what they do. It is really great and interesting content.
- This one features Kristin Jansen Dougan, class of 1995.
- We also occasionally receive emails from alums who want to share their research. In one example, Joe Siegel, class of 2001, was interested in sharing some of the research he had been doing on linguistics and second language learning. We offered to set up a display in one of our library cases and to publish a blog post. He wrote content for the post and sent us a picture, and all we had to do was to publish it. His mother and grandmother were so proud that his alma mater had a display and blog post about his work that they even came in to the library see his picture and research in the case.
- Angela: other useful way to come up with engaging content you know the community will be interested in is to spend some time browsing the content the members of your community are putting out there. A few examples of things we’ve noticed are: Professors talking about books, then us being able to say that we have the book, or just ordered it. Tracking the Lawrence University hashtag on Tumblr or searching hashtags on Instagram to see what’s going on around campus Looking at YikYak for comments about the library. Have any of you used YikYak before? Take caution, posts are made totally anonymously and can get pretty scandalous.
- When we see members of the Lawrence community talking about current events, or events on campus, to think about how the library could be helpful in providing answers or links to resources on social media. For example, Allison, our social media student worker, knew about an upcoming body positivity fair coming up on campus, so she posted links to library materials and related content.
- Another example of browsing community content that led to a fair amount of social media coverage was from browsing the Lawrence Class of 2018 Facebook group. Joining this Facebook group gave me the opportunity to see what the incoming freshman were interested in knowing, and what some of their general interests were. One student posted to the group asking everyone to post their favorite movies. I noticed that a lot of students mentioned Studio Ghibli movies (such as My Neighbor Totoro or Princess Mononoke). This gave me the idea of setting up a display of the library’s collection of studio Ghibli movies and related books for when the new students arrived on campus. Like many other schools, new students have a week on campus before classes start. After I set up the display, I posted a picture to the Facebook group- with a great response. I also posted it to Tumblr, which is what I’ve shown here.
- Another example is finding fun student-created content that we can share, such as a student’s web comic, Man Versus Manatee.
- Sometimes, alumni will help us out without us even asking, like in this post. We posted the picture of the ladies dining circa 1955 along with an announcement about Thanksgiving hours. An alumna then posted with names of many of the ladies pictured, which was very helpful since our archivist had not been able to identify any of them previously. As you can see, our archivist then thanked her.
- Something we began doing a few years back is a blog series called meet the staff. We felt it would be interesting for the Lawrence community to have the opportunity to learn more about the people who work in the library. Holly and I generated a list of questions, sent it out to interested library staff, and made blog posts from their responses. We have shared these on Facebook and a Pinterest board. When posting these to Facebook, it is great to be able to tag the subject, which notifies their friends of the post and generates more readers and engagement. I should also mention that all of our blog posts feed automatically to Twitter. Here’s an excerpt of one from our Interlibrary Loan Assistant, Andrew McSorley. The question and answer format is awesome!! It generate paragraphs worth of really great content without too much effort as we use the same questions over and over.
- Here’s another one of Acquisitions Assistant, Amanda Lee. This idea has a lot of possibilities for posting. As mentioned it began as a blog post, was shared on all of our social media channels. We could even get more mileage out of this by featuring individual questions and answers as posts, creating a post of just the library staff’s favorite books or blogs. We are always looking for ways to turn one feature into many features.
- We really wanted to focus on our student workers as well, and highlight how important their work is to the library, we extended the Meet the Staff features to include student workers. First we would just ask students who worked a lot over breaks, such as Thomas Malm. Again, by sharing these to Facebook and tagging the students in the post comment, we were able get more engagement and views. Tagging the students, generating follows from their friends We found these posts to be very insightful…
- Just recently we made a sign up sheet and left it behind the library circulation desk for interested students to volunteer to participate. This worked out great to get participation from students that we didn’t know that well who still wanted to share their stories and interests. One such student is Tyler Grasee. Could you do something like this with your volunteers?
- Once again using the very helpful question and answer format.
- Over the we realized that it would be awesome to be able to feature the students who were diligently working in the library all summer. We approached one of them, William Gislason, who was more than happy to agree to write up a little about his summer research. Do you think a library regular would like to be featured?
- Will actually asked to do two posts for the library. It turned out he was in the process of applying for an internship position at a local paper, and wanted to have some samples to show. So, in addition to the student research post, he also wrote up a post entitled, “5 things I wish I Knew about the Mudd Library as a Freshman.” It was an excellent post that we were able to publish during welcome week as well as share on Facebook and Twitter- as we do with all of our blog posts. We also printed it out an hung it in the library. This is a great example of how just asking one person to participate can lead to even more ideas for content creation.
- We set out signs all over the library inviting the community to take a #muddselfie #muddselfie- student generated content but can only see some of the content. We liked their pictures, which gained us some followers, then used the Repost & Regram app to repost the selfies, and made sure to tag them in the post. This was a fun idea, but the problem was that we were only able to see a small number of the posts, as many of them were on private accounts. Nonetheless, another idea of inviting patrons to create content.
- In our library, we have a large notepad on an easel. Just about every week we write a new question on it, and receive interesting responses from the students. One week, we asked the students to write a haiku about finals or getting our of bed. This led to my favorite haiku, (nos). It made for great content to photograph and share on Facebook. So many possibilities here, although at times we cannot share the content as it is inappropriate. Some fun questions include: What’s your favorite book? Where are you travelling this summer?
- During library week last year, we created several stations which featured slips of paper asking our patrons what they love about the library and a box to place their answers. We created some powerpoint slides with the answers, and continue to use these as posts on social media, as well as for electronic and paper posters to hang around the library and campus.
- This is another example highlighting the importance of simply paying attention. One day, upon thinking about what to post, we spotted Antoinette in the middle of a reference appointment with a group of students. We snapped a pic and our problem was solved. This is a great way to highlight lesser known services. Had we asked the students for permission to tag, we would have really increased the number of views and likes.
- This fall, I was able to get funding from the Provost to bring three students with me to the Wisconsin Library Association conference. I brought three students who were interested in pursuing library science after Lawrence. The students were able to attend sessions, as well as help out at the makerspace table I was running in the exhibit hall for the day. After the conference, I asked each of them to write about their experiences along with what the conference taught them about the profession that they may not have known before. It turned into a very interesting post, and showed the campus that we are serious about helping students with their plans after Lawrence.
- AP sharing the score before the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra.
- This section could sort of be called “missed opportunities”. Our history department works closely with our special collections as well, specifically the class, The American Civil War. In addition to a more general rare and antique book collection, we also have a collection related to President Lincoln and the American Civil War. The students are able to handle very old documents, such as the first printing of the Oration at the Battle of Gettysburg, and see documents signed by president Lincoln. I mentioned missed opportunities, because a photo of the class and professor would have been a great opportunity for social media content.
- Another example of missed opportunities is the use of the library’s iPads by the Environmental Studies senior capstone course. Taking a picture of the class would have been a great way to share the news of our classroom set of iPads that are available for use. It also would have been great for the mission of the university to show that our classes are technology enhanced, and for the library, to show that we are also technology-enhanced. We did, however, get the students from last year’s class to complete a survey. We could still use anonymous quotes from the survey responses on our social media channels. Learning from our mistakes
- (Holly should definitely do this one- where should we put it?) Look around the library with fresh eyes. Think of the library, floor by floor, -and identify areas that patrons are using- such as materials, spaces, technologies, services, etc. Then think about how we could share that information to let even more patrons become familiar with what the library can offer. Reaching out to library users asking for collaboration often is less awkward than it sounds. Many of us know that library patrons who spend a lot of time in the library often become friendly with library staff.
- Did you notice that MANY of our ideas for creating community content started with a simple question. Just ask! We’ve found that people love to be featured, and love to talk about their work. You spot a well-known user. Ask her what her favorite book is….Why she’s in the library today….What’s her favorite space or program in the library? Snap a picture, share the quote, and you’ve got yourself a post. Don’t forget to tag her so that all of her friends can see and follow you!