5
You need to clean out those old sources of your social-media diet that are no longer nourishing, dust the cobwebs off those old connections to keep them polished and valuable, and clean out the dirt from the corners of your social life where you haven’t ventured in months.
—ERIC FULWILER1
Social media is an ephemeral medium. Your post may catch the attention of someone only for as long as they are actually looking at it. They will quickly move on to other content, especially if your update is lacking in some way. I often receive questions from library staff about how to make updates more interesting or relevant to the end user. In chapter 4, we examined some specific status updates and examples of how they could be made better. In this section, we will take a closer look, examining additional and common problems with library status updates, and more models for effective engagement.
Mistake: Not Making It Easy
The nature of social media often makes people somewhat lazy: it presents a stream of instant information in real or almost-real time. That stream comes directly to the reader in most cases, and does not involve much, if any, effort to obtain. Arguably, people are becoming used to having information pushed to them, rather than having to retrieve it. One result of this is that readers of your content are becoming less likely to make the effort to get additional information about what you’re posting—unless they’re very motivated to do so. Take this status update:
Check out our hottest summer DVD releases!
This post does not even include a link that would potentially make it easy to find out what new releases a library has. A patron is very unlikely to come to the library and say, “I saw your post about the hot new summer DVDs. Where are they?” She’ll want to know what the actual titles are before ever physically going to the library and, if possible, may want to reserve them in advance. Unfortunately, neither action is possible in this case; no information was provided to allow her to do so.
A similar problem occurs with this update:
Read Dan Porat’s The Boy: A Holocaust Story. To be ordered on 11/21.
Here, the post tells the reader to carry out an action (reading a particular book), but there isn’t a link allowing one to learn more about the book or reserve it. Chances are good that once this tweet is out of sight, it will also be out of mind for the reader. If the library wanted more people to read this book as a result of the post, it’s very likely it failed to do so.
In both cases, each post could be made significantly more effective simply by the addition of a hyperlink to relevant information. Even on Facebook and some other networks, where there is a much higher character limit on posts, it’s always a good idea to include a link to the more permanent home of the information on your library’s website. This not only prevents readers from becoming overwhelmed by too much text, but it can also help to increase your site’s incoming traffic. If your website metrics show referrers (where people came from to get to your site), this can also provide another way for you to gauge the potential impact of your social media posts.
Some updates may simply be missing important information. Think about this library’s tweet:
Today at 3:45, we are showing a new release on our BIG projector screen! Hope to see you there. Free, no need to register.
This post mentions the date and time and even the fact that registration is not required. Yet it is missing what many might consider the most important piece of information anyone would want: the movie’s title! How many people are going to want to take the time to figure out the library’s phone number and call the library just to get this information?
Missing information may also be based on an assumption that the reader already has it. This library’s post seems to make such an assumption:
Author Rob Smith is coming to the library tonight at 7 pm.
The problem here is, if one’s not familiar with the author, there’s no incentive to attend the program. Also, as with earlier examples, there’s no link to more information. A remade post might look something like this:
Local author Rob Smith (http://smithwrite.net), author of the McGowan Chronicles, will be speaking here tonight at 7 pm [LINK].
At the very least, this provides a little bit of context for the readers who are not aware of the author’s work.
Present the most interesting information in the social media post and include a link to more information. The first two previous examples could be remade to look something like these:
Hot new summer DVD releases are here. Reserve them while they’re . . . well . . . hot: [LINK].
Get in line to be one of the first to get Dan Porat’s The Boy: A Holocaust Story [LINK].
Both of these remade examples not only link to more information, but they may also give the reader a sense of urgency that might make him or her more likely to take the action being recommended.
BOTTOM LINE Don’t make your library’s fans or followers work to get what you want them to know or do. Include essential information. Make the post interesting enough to hook them and (hopefully) entice them into taking further action with a provided link.
Mistake: Not Making the Payoff Clear
Libraries often give at least the appearance of assuming people will just naturally want to come to their programs or take advantage of their services. Consider this post:
Mango Languages is a new online resource available to users of all public libraries in our state. It includes a variety . . . [LINK].
It’s probably at least a bit exciting to the library staff that this new resource is available to the public, but there is no real sense of this enthusiasm being communicated in this update. Further hindering engagement is that there’s nothing in this post to hook possible users to try the new resource. What the reader might get from Mango Languages is not stated at all. Compare that to this remade version:
Learn a new language. Today. For free. Online. With your library card. Introducing Mango Languages: [LINK].
The difference is plain: the second version tells readers exactly what they are going to get before the library even mentions the name of the product. The remade message also gives the information that is most likely to hook a user: the library says right up front that the reader can learn a new language for free and online with just a library card. By doing these things it’s much more effective; it prioritizes the needs of the end user over the thing being promoted.
Libraries sometimes also produce updates that may seem irrelevant to non–library staff. Take this example:
National Library Week, April 10–16. [LINK]
If readers are not aware of National Library Week, there is nothing to hook them. Even if readers are aware of National Library Week, is there any real incentive to learn more? Simply knowing the subject matter of a post is not usually enough to drive someone to take any action on it. In this case, the library would be better off promoting a series of special events, or asking followers to help the library celebrate in a particular way that sounds interesting to the reader.
BOTTOM LINE Always remember that posts have to be written as to be relevant to the reader immediately. If readers can’t quickly figure out what’s in it for them, the post will be judged irrelevant and will be ignored.
Mistake: Being Too Bossy
Give some thought to the following status updates. Can you spot the common issue with all of them?
Come to “Local Herbalist Shares History of Herbal Medicines” today from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. [LINK]
Check out Second National Bank’s window on Main Street for this fantastic display put up by staff. [LINK]
Come to “Library Seeks Candidate for Trustee Position” today from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. [LINK]
Join our new Book Discussion Group! [LINK]
Be a member of our new Patron Advisory Board. [LINK]
Try our new research database for your next assignment. [LINK]
All of these updates, and many others produced by libraries, begin with command words. Words such as come, check out, join, and be all tell the user to do something, rather than ask for a response. The problem is compounded because not only is the library in each post commanding the reader to perform an action, but there is also no apparent reason for the reader to comply. Where’s the payoff? If your library chooses to take a carrot-and-stick approach to social media, it must at least remember to provide the carrot.
Each of the prior examples could be made over like this:
Curious about the history of herbal medicines? Local herbalist tells all beginning at 7 pm. [LINK]
It took 2 hours, 4 staff and more than 500 yards of streamers. What do you think of the display we did for Second National Bank on Main Street? [LINK TO PHOTO]
Not everyone is cut out to be a Library Trustee—are you? We’re looking for a new one for next year. [LINK]
Can’t stop talking about that book you just read? Yeah, us too. Now we’ve got a group for that: [LINK]
Looking for opinionated folks who want to talk about the library. Cookies at every meeting and a chance to make a difference. [LINK]
Wikipedia not good enough for your teacher? Show ’em you’re a smart cookie and try a free resource from us. [LINK]
BOTTOM LINE Avoid sounding like a drill sergeant by not issuing updates that command readers to do something. If you can’t avoid commands, at least be sure to make it clear what the reader will get by following the command.
Mistake: Being Overly Excited
If you were to look at a collection of social media posts gathered from an assortment of libraries, you might begin to notice a trend concerning the use of exclamation points. Many, many status updates use exclamation points as if adding them to a piece of social media content will somehow make it inherently more exciting and urgent. Take, for example:
Harry Potter Party at the Main Library Thursday, July 14, at 3 pm!!!!!!!!
Adding more than one exclamation point is intended to convey extreme excitement. But what about the following?
BEAT THE HEAT! CAN’T GO TO THE POOL? KEEP COOL AT YOUR LIBRARY!
Please take our brief survey! [LINK]
Library has reopened! Check out our new carpet, brighter lighting and more! [LINK]
Crafts and Fun around the World! Grades K–4, Thursday, 10:30–11:30 am! Registration required, Call [PHONE NUMBER] for more information!
Don’t forget to register for the Princess Party this Friday! [LINK]
Some of these status updates exhibit other problems as well, but they all have unnecessary exclamation points in common.
Exclamation points, by nature, indicate that something is (significantly) more important than something else. They’re used to indicate emphasis for a particular thing. When they are used constantly, it quickly diminishes their meaning and effectiveness, much like crying “Wolf!” constantly. James Chartrand, a copywriter and founder of the online community Men with Pens, writes:
There are the exclamation-point addicts out there, you see. They’re the writers who feel they really can’t put across the excitement, immediacy, or sincerity without that little extra boost (!) to make it feel super-charged. They’re the writers who believe that they should slap an exclamation point at the end of a written sentence anytime they would allow their voice to lift at the end of spoken one. . . . Exclamation points, you see, are evil.2
Chartrand says that using them can make the reader doubt the authenticity of the statement. “If you have confidence in what you say, in what you write, you sound much more believable without exclamation points. Every time. No exceptions.”3
Social media offers a much less formal communications platform than many, yet being able to write effectively is just as important. Professional writers rarely, if ever, use exclamation points in their writing. If you examine the social media updates of major companies or institutions, you’ll usually be hard-put to find any, let alone a constant stream of them. Here are some tweets from well-known entities:
Really great feedback from #blogchat participants tonight. Awesome discussion re customer service via blogs, social media, etc. (Dell)
From 2006 to 2010, Harvard spawned 39 start-up companies, 216 patents, and 1,270 faculty inventions. #numberswednesday (Harvard University)
Be careful in the heat this week. Stay cool (and classy) with these tips: [LINK] (American Red Cross)
Enjoying your Morning Joe? Find out how coffee experts crown Colombia’s best beans. [LINK] (Wired magazine)
More than 1000 languages spoken in New Guinea. One of the most culturally and biological diverse places on earth. [LINK] (Smithsonian Education)
Try replacing the periods in each of these with an exclamation point. Chances are, the results will make you cringe.
BOTTOM LINE Exclamation points do not make your library’s content more exciting. Rather, they increase the likelihood of it looking unprofessional, causing the reader to doubt its sincerity. Focus on writing interesting updates that do not use exclamation points as a crutch.
Mistake: Automated Content
There are many apps that allow one to automatically post content from other sites to one’s social network accounts. For example, you may be familiar with tweets such as this one:
I posted 6 photos on Facebook in the album “Cool Crafts 2011.” [LINK]
There’s a lot to be said for the convenience of having an application automatically announce new content. However, this kind of update will usually be ignored. There’s no payoff for the reader and, more important, it’s plain to see that it is automated, especially since the format of these types of items doesn’t change significantly. There’s simply no attempt to engage the reader: this post and its ilk make a simple announcement that’s almost certain to be discounted by the library’s followers. Some people even consider these kinds of updates to be spam.
Rather than waste effort (and turn off your library’s fans in the process), make sure to add some relevant context to posted content. Simply announcing new content may not be enough to garner any real interest. Find the hook, or the payoff, that is going to make the content interesting enough for someone to want to click the link and actually see it. Try something like this:
Geodomes made with gumdrops, constructed with care by our local kids. See the pics: [LINK]
Being specific here has value; the announcement is not generic. The craft idea may be unique to some, and by stating that local children are involved it may inspire some to click the link to see if they know the kids.
It should be noted there’s a difference between automating the content of posts and automating their actual posting to a social network. There are many ways to schedule updates at future times, such as using social media dashboards like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, or many third-party applications specifically developed to publish social media content on specific dates and times. These tools can be very helpful in spreading the social media workload evenly. Just remember the content that is scheduled still needs to be engaging.
BOTTOM LINE Scheduling your content for automatic publishing is fine, but beware of apps that publish announcements that end up being worthless or annoying to the library’s fans or followers.
Mistake: Forcing Fans and Followers to Another Medium or Network
Consider this question, posted by a mother to a library’s Facebook Wall:
I’d like to bring my daughter to your storytime. What day and time is it held?
Then ponder the library’s response:
We offer storytime several times a week, for different age groups. Please call the library at [PHONE NUMBER].
The problem with the library’s response may not be obvious, unless you are the mother who asked the question of the library. The original poster asked the question in one medium—Facebook—and instead of being answered in that medium, she was told to switch to another: the telephone. It’s likely that this woman felt considerable frustration after receiving this response. She may have thought she could get a quick, easy answer from asking the question on Facebook, rather than having to potentially wade through a telephone system to get the information she needed. Instead of inadvertently making this harder for the mother, the library could have handled this two different ways, depending on the circumstances:
• The library could have linked directly to its storytime schedule on its website (assuming that there was such a schedule there).
• The library could have responded with a question of its own, asking for additional information from the mother. Knowing what age the daughter is would allow the library to quickly answer the question. If privacy is a concern, the mother could privately message the information to the library’s Facebook Page administrator via Facebook’s messaging system.
Occasionally, a library will try to get patrons to jump from one network to another in order to obtain content. One example is this library’s tweet:
Click “Like” on our Facebook Page to see all of our cool programs. [LINK]
If someone is following the library on Twitter, they will probably expect this content to be available via either tweets or possibly through links to the library’s website. Forcing someone to become a fan of the library on another network will turn at least some followers off. It’s hardly fair to expect someone to click “Like” just to get what should be rightfully available in other places of the medium (or another medium) that person is already engaged in with the library.
BOTTOM LINE Make every effort to respond to queries in the same medium in which they’re made. Don’t turn off your library’s supporters, or potential ones, by forcing them to jump through hoops to get content.
Mistake: Not Getting to the Point
Since it has a limit of only 140 characters, Twitter forces content writers to create very succinct updates. Nevertheless, some libraries attempt to bypass the limit by linking to what amounts to the rest of a tweet. For example:
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, one of the best-selling novels of all time and the basis for an Academy Award winning film . . . [LINK]
This post is making an assumption: that the reader will bother to click and read the rest of it. Considering that people’s tweet streams may have hundreds of messages per hour, the chances of someone bothering to click a link, just to read the rest of this statement, are very low. This issue is closely related to the problem of not having an immediate and clear payoff for the reader. Here’s one with a similar concern:
During the Great Depression, not one single public library closed its doors. See this amazing . . . [LINK]
This statement is even more vague than the first example, since it’s completely left to the reader to guess the point of the post. While the mystery may intrigue some people, the majority will ignore it. Hoping to interest readers by intentionally leaving off details is unlikely to be a successful ploy: Twitter followers are quickly scanning their streams, looking for pertinent information. If you can’t provide something that proves itself immediately relevant to them, the content will be passed over. Worse, repeated irrelevance and vague tweets may lead to a library being unfollowed (we’ll examine this more in just a moment).
If you can’t make the point clear and the reward obvious in 140 characters, it may be that the content is better suited for a social network such as Facebook, where the text limit is much higher. Bear in mind tweets that take up all or nearly all of the available characters have an additional hitch: they cannot be easily retweeted by others, since they will need to attribute the tweet to your library and that will require more characters. “As a general rule, if you want your tweet to be easily retweetable, make it no more than 120 characters including the link,”4 says Yvette Pistorio, the Social Media Community Manager at Cision.
BOTTOM LINE Never assume anyone will keep reading your library’s content if they have to go somewhere else to get the rest of it. Be relevant, immediately, or be ignored.
Mistake: Flooding Others with Updates
Recently, I felt forced to unfollow some libraries on Twitter. I could always tell when their appointed people would sit down in the mornings to do their social media work, because my Twitter stream would immediately be filled with many consecutive (usually banal) tweets, announcing programs or events. Here’s a sample from one such library; all of these came in consecutively, literally within one minute:
Tiddlywinks! When: Wednesday, July 13, 2011—10:00 am. Where: Children’s Area at Main. [LINK]
Poolside Stories @ Community Pool: When: Wednesday, July 13, 2011—2:00 pm. [LINK]
Poolside @ the Civic Center: When: Wednesday, July 27, 2011—2:00 pm. [LINK]
Storytime @ Public Pool: When: Wednesday, July 13, 2011—2:00.
Chess Club for Kids: When: Wednesday, July 27, 2011—2:30. [LINK]
Five posts within a minute are far too many, too fast. Essentially, I felt that these libraries were spamming me on a daily basis. Mike Johansson, a social media strategist and visiting professor in the department of communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says that this is one of the ten most common newbie Twitter mistakes. “If you’re guilty of this you will annoy your followers and water down your message . . . which likely means you’ll lose followers faster than you get them.”5 As tempting as it might be to get all of your content out there at once, this method will not support your library’s social media efforts.
Fine-tuning your library’s quantity of posts is important. Johansson recommends starting slowly, posting only two or three times per day. As your library works toward increasing this amount, pay attention to what actually garners responses or engagement, such as comments or retweets. Use these examples as your guideposts for what works and what doesn’t. Another way to spread the work out is to use one of the many tools that can automate social media posting. By scheduling updates to be published at future times, your library can ensure it’s not inadvertently spamming any of its followers.
BOTTOM LINE Spread posts out and don’t deluge fans or followers with too much content at once. Small, digestible, and occasional bites are far preferable and are less likely to alienate people permanently.
Notes
1. Eric Fulwiler, “An 8-Step Plan for Social Media Spring Cleaning,” April 1, 2010, www.blog.ericfulwiler.com/social-media/an-8-step-plan-for-social-media-spring-cleaning.
2. James Chartrand, “Is Your Website Copy Too Excited?” Men with Pens, 2009, http://menwithpens.ca/no-exclamation-points.
3. Ibid.
4. Yvette Pistorio, “5 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid,” June 30, 2011, http://blog.us.cision.com/2011/06/5-twitter-mistakes-to-avoid.
5. Mike Johansson, “10 Newbie Twitter Mistakes Made By Businesses,” Social Media Today, March 8, 2010, http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/179967.