Creating social media committees to increase your library’s social presence

This article was originally published in June 2019 and was updated by the author in March 2021.

It is the first of a three-part series on social media activities for academic libraries. The other articles in the series are “Instagram: the new way to connect with students” and “Using Twitter to connect with faculty.”

March 2021 update

When I first wrote this article, the members of our library’s Social Media Committee (SMC) were all working at our respective campus locations. Today, as our institution participates in a blended approach to learning, we are all working from home. So here I sit in what is now my living room, office and kid’s playroom – a scenario I truly did not foresee happening. Now, one year after the doors of our libraries have closed, we see that the pandemic has provided our SMC with both challenges and opportunities.

In March 2020, the various academic support services at our institution quickly realized that to maintain and sustain connections within the community, they needed to either engage with social media or reinvigorate existing channels. By this time, the library’s SMC had built a respectable reputation for our ability to create and maintain online engagement, especially amongst the student population. Other departments were aware of our impact, specifically on Facebook and Instagram, and they began to request collaborations. Happy to partner with other departments, our focus in the 2020-2021 academic year has shifted to supporting an isolated community and doing whatever we can to make our students and staff feel that they are still part of something.

Although things have shifted, our social media committee still remains, and my tips for how to effectively manage this committee remain consistent – with a few modifications based on our new environment.

Harness and share your library’s voice

Showcasing the voice of our committee members has come into sharper focus since March 2020. Realizing that our students and staff are seeking out a sense of kinship, we started to feature our SMC members more often. Previous to the pandemic, our efforts were often focused on things happening around campus, now we focus on our everyday lives working from home.

We try to post about common experiences that make everyone feel lighter and happier, such as enjoying a cup of coffee out of your favorite mug. It is much less academic and it seems to be working.

With this change in focus has also come a change in our demographics. Staff have begun to engage with us (in particular on Facebook), a welcome surprise in this time of isolation. We now include them in all of our social media campaigns.

Committee membership: the key ingredients are… representation and energy

Although all SMCs will have technical functions, as stated earlier, their main focus is developing and sharing an organization’s voice. Ensure membership represents your library’s workforce. Our committee consists of six members, including four from technical service departments (reference, interlibrary loans, marketing and branch management) and the marketing and user experience librarians. There is at least one member from each campus library location. The library’s voice is defined in our social media guidelines:

The library’s voice is your voice! Be professional, but also be authentic “the unique way we think and how we say things helps us come across as authentic, which makes us seem ‘more human’ online” (King, 2012, p. 6). Don’t turn your online interactions into institutional speak, leave in the quirks and personality. – Saskatchewan Polytechnic Social Media Guidelines.

Most team members joined voluntarily. That said, throughout the lifetime of the SMC, some members have been “volun-told” to join in an effort to fill locational gaps. If you need to recruit employees into membership, try to give them less intimidating roles that don’t include administrative duties. Include them in conversations and use their ideas. Over time they may want to start creating content and administering platforms, but don’t force it.

We are currently in a time of changeover. With a few vacant positions, we plan to relook at our committee’s strategy, workflow, goals and do some planning around recruitment. We would like to open up invitations to current and new library employees and we hope to recruit individuals who are excited, energetic and who can help us to refresh the library’s voice. We are also looking into the possibility of inviting student interns into the mix.

The target audience informs all things

Not all platforms are worth your time. Don’t try to be all things to all people or to have a presence on every social media platform. Assess your audience, in formal or informal ways, and choose your platforms accordingly.

In the past, we’ve used informal assessment strategies. When we have face-to-face interaction with students, we simply ask them what platforms they use. This usually occurs when a librarian committee member is facilitating library orientations at the beginning of fall and winter terms. Our method is simple: we ask, “By a show of hands, who uses Facebook? Instagram?” Over time we’ve seen fewer hands for the former and more for the latter, and lately we’ve received many an odd glance that we would even suggest a student does not use Instagram daily.

The SMC also takes advantage of more formal feedback channels, when we submit questions for our Library Advisory Council and the library’s biannual institutional survey.

And in the past year, we have started to use Instagram Polls as a way to gather information. Just last week we hosted a “this” or “that” poll asking our audience a combination of fun and library-related questions. You’ll note that this is again, an informal method of gathering feedback, the amount of responses changes from question to question and we can only include up to two options, but it provides us with some interesting tidbits of information. Here are a few:

What have we learned? We can never guess what the trend of the day will be with our audience. Although Instagram has been increasingly taking precedent in the social media lives of our students, we still have a fair amount of engagement on Facebook. And, although one might expect that print books are a thing of the past, our most recent poll says different. So we have to continue to ask questions and remain aware of new social media trends.

Meet regularly

This is essential. Regular meetings ensure a forum for discussion, brainstorming and (oftentimes) grievances. We meet monthly via videoconference to prepare for the following month. When we meet in January, posts for that month have already been planned and scheduled, so we are discussing February’s content and post assignments. Here is our standing agenda:

• Successes and loose ends from the previous month

• Post ideas for the following month

• Post assignments

• Additional miscellaneous items

We also meet once each spring to discuss successes and failures from the past year and our plans for moving forward.

Since moving to an entirely online environment – our need to use social media has changed in some ways—we are doing more collaborative work with other departments and supporting other areas in the library, such as User Experience. This has resulted in the need for more ‘just-in-time’ meetings for the committee. More than once we have had to meet outside of our scheduled time to take care of something emergent. Our team also chats on a zoom channel daily, something completely new to us since working from home.

All of this rolls into the next necessary recommendation to be flexible.

Be flexible

Have conversations and listen to your members. Allow them to try new things. The key strength of the committee is that it harnesses the creativity of each member, so if a team member has an idea for a new post, let them try it, as long it doesn’t contradict your library’s mission. Don’t micromanage. Nothing kills creativity like rigidity.

One important change that we embraced this past year is allowing institutional staff to participate (along with students) in our social media contests. We had received complaints from staff members, who felt left out, previous to the pandemic, but hadn’t thought much of it. In our minds, social media was always a tool we used to connect with students. However, we realized quickly that students are not the only members of our community that are feeling isolated, and as indicated in a previous section, we have decided to include staff in most of our campaigns since March 2020.

Pay attention to analytics

We use Hootsuite to pre-schedule posts, to work collaboratively and to pull analytics reports. We use Later to pull Instagram analytics, and we are mindful that for some Instagram information, we have to pull the information within a 24-hour period (as is the case with Stories). We pull some information directly from platforms, depending on which areas we are interested in focusing on. It’s important to be very ‘librarian’ about this – search for all the information you need to resolve your research question, and pause before moving forward with new campaigns or goals: review the data, then make the decision.

Final thoughts

Social media is not a one-person job.  There was a time when I attempted to run our library’s social media alone. I found it stressful and I couldn’t make an impact. The SMC has been the reason for the library’s successful engagement on various platforms. We are the perfect combination of quirky, professional, energetic and organized. I often arrive at meetings with brand-new exciting ideas to be told by my team that “no, no that probably won’t work”. I appreciate that the team brings a wide range of experience, expertise, and creativity and that each member cares about the work we do. In the new environment, we have barely skipped a beat, and in fact, have realized that one of the things we should do is pull back a little in terms of posting and content -- in order to avoid contributing to our community's feeling of online fatigue.

The main facets of running the team have remained the same, we continue to harness the strength of our individual members, to work as a team that creates a single library voice, and we remain flexible and mindful of our audience and our institution’s needs.

June 2019 article

It’s summer, a time of year for academic librarians to reflect, assess and revamp. For me, it’s a time to reflect on social media, which has become an essential way that our academic library connects with students. In the past couple of years, I have experienced both successes and failures in managing our social media channels. But the secret to our successes, big and small, was our social media committee (SMC).

At our institution—a technical college serving 27,897 students across five distinct geographic locations—our social media strength is entirely driven by the SMC. It has taken several years to conceptualize and create efficient administration for this group, but the reasons for its existence have always been clear. The library’s social media voice is that of its staff. It must represent employees at various levels and from different locations. Communication with patrons should encompass a sense of camaraderie, individuality and creativity.

Here are some tips for creating an effective SMC. They can be applied to many types of organizations that are looking to up their social media game.

Harness and share your library’s voice

Although all SMCs will have technical functions, their main focus is developing and sharing an organization’s voice. Ensure membership represents your library’s workforce. Our committee consists of six members, including four from technical service departments (reference, interlibrary loans, marketing and branch management) and the marketing and user experience librarians. There is at least one member from each campus library location. The library’s voice is defined in our social media guidelines:

The library’s voice is your voice! Be professional, but also be authentic “the unique way we think and how we say things helps us come across as authentic, which makes us seem ‘more human’ online” (King, 2012, p. 6). Don’t turn your online interactions into institutional speak, leave in the quirks and personality. – Saskatchewan Polytechnic Social Media Guidelines.

Most team members joined voluntarily. That said, throughout the lifetime of the SMC, some members have been “volun-told” to join in an effort to fill locational gaps. If you need to recruit employees into membership, try to give them less intimidating roles that don’t include administrative duties. Include them in conversations and use their ideas. Over time they may want to start creating content and administering platforms, but don’t force it.

The user or target audience informs all things

Not all platforms are worth your time. Don’t try to be all things to all people or to have a presence on every social media platform. Assess your audience, in formal or informal ways, and choose your platforms accordingly.

I use an informal assessment strategy. When I have face-to-face interaction with students, I simply ask them what platforms they use. This usually occurs when I am facilitating library orientations at the beginning of fall and winter terms. My method is simple: I ask them, “By show of hands, who uses Facebook? Instagram?” Over time I’ve seen fewer hands for the former and more for the latter, and lately I’ve received many an odd glance that I would even suggest a student does not use Instagram daily.

The SMC also takes advantage of more formal feedback channels, when we submit questions for our Library Advisory Council and the library’s biannual institutional survey.

What have we learned? Since 2013, when we started collecting feedback, our students have been and remain heavy Facebook users, and Instagram is edging in swiftly. Therefore, these are our platforms of focus for reaching out to students.

Meet regularly

This is essential. Regular meetings ensure a forum for discussion, brainstorming and (oftentimes) grievances. We meet monthly via videoconference to prepare for the following month. When we meet in January, posts for that month have already been planned and scheduled, so we are discussing February’s content and post assignments. Here is our standing agenda:

• Successes and loose ends from the previous month

• Post ideas for the following month

• Post assignments

• Additional miscellaneous items

We also meet once each spring to discuss successes and failures from the past year and our plans for moving forward.

Be flexible

Have conversations and listen to your members. Allow them to try new things. The key strength of the committee is that it harnesses the creativity of each member, so if a team member has an idea for a new post, let them try it, as long it doesn’t contradict your library’s mission. Don’t micromanage. Nothing kills creativity like rigidity.

Use analytics

We use Hootsuite to pre-schedule posts, work collaboratively and pull analytics reports.

It’s crucial to pull analytics from all platforms to assess the previous year’s performance. Discuss what worked and what didn’t. Make sure the team is included in decisions.

Final thoughts

Social media is not a one-person job.  There was a time when I attempted to run our library’s social media alone. I found it stressful and couldn’t make an impact. The reason we have experienced success since (for instance, a gain of more than 1,000 student likes on Facebook since 2016) is largely because of this team.

It is the first of a three-part series on social media activities for academic libraries. The other articles in the series are “Instagram: the new way to connect with students” and “Using Twitter to connect with faculty.”

Suggested reading

• Social Media Committees Verishagen & Nann: Social Media Committees: Sharing Your Library’s Voice 새 탭/창에서 열기

• Assessing your patrons Sich & Polger, 2019, How to Assess Student Social Media Preferences: A Comparison at Two Academic Institutions.

• Social Scheduling Software Paul & Holt – Using Scheduling Apps to Streamline a Social Media Workflow).

• Platform selection Swan - The Right Social Media Platform for Your Library).

• Facebook Gain Likes Contest Verishagen & Liang: Buying Likes: How Our Library Jumped from 200 to 1000 (student) Likes in 8 Months