Creating A Library Social Media Strategy

Are you looking to improve your library’s presence on social media but you’re not quite sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place! The best way to start is by creating a social media strategy. By taking some time to sit down and answer a few questions about what you’re looking to get out of social media, you can set a framework for a solid social media plan. Once you’ve created a social media strategy, the rest will fall into place! Let’s get started.

Mission & Goals

First, you’ll want to get anyone at your library who will be contributing to social media together for a brainstorm session. We know that sometimes budgeting is tight and libraries don’t always have a designated marketing role or team, so it’s best to include everyone who will help with social media to be on the same page right from the start. Maybe even assign team roles so each staff member is responsible for a part of the process (creating, posting, and measuring performance.) Together as a group, define your mission as a library using social media. Why do you want to use social media? To relay information and announcements to patrons? To get new patrons or library card holders? To connect with your community? Answering these questions will set your mission and then you can create steps that you’ll need to take in order to achieve this mission. Steps or goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-sensitive. For example, if your mission is to get new card holders, your goal might be to post a library card related promotion or incentive on your Facebook page once a month. Each month you can look at the engagement on this post, as well as how many new library cards were distributed to track how well this goal is doing.

Audience & Competitors

As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, it’s always important to figure out who your target audience is in social media and marketing. The more you know about your patrons, the more you can tailor your messaging to their personas and needs. Since librarians and library staff tend to have a lot of face-to-face interaction with patrons, it should be easy to figure out what content they’re interested in hearing more about. Also take some time to look at what other libraries or “competitors” are sharing on their social media. This will help give a good idea of how to best use social media platforms but also how to differentiate your content from other libraries to make it unique.

Use Tools & Measure Performance

Pick a couple of social media platforms to focus on. It makes the most sense to focus on the platforms that your target audience uses the most and create consistent content for those pages, rather than trying them all and spreading your team too thin. Creating original and thoughtful content for a few platforms a certain number of times a month will produce better results. Check out our blog with fresh social media content ideas for inspiration on what to post. Then look into what tools (free or otherwise) are out there to help manage your social media. If you’d like to plan ahead and schedule weeks of social posts, there are several tools that would be great to utilize that eliminate the tediousness of posting each day at a specific time. And of course, after implementing the plan and beginning to post on social media consistently, be sure to always check the analytics on social media platforms to get more in-depth information on how your posts are performing. Creating the social media strategy first serves as a guide that your library staff can always refer back to. If the strategy is working as planned and you’re achieving what you set out to achieve, all is good! If not, don’t be afraid to make changes to the content you’re creating or the platforms you’re using to meet your goals. A social media strategy should always be evolving as you learn!