Five Tips for Managing Your Library’s Social Media

We understand that staff at your library may have a lot of priorities and tasks on their plate, and managing social media could seem overwhelming or not worth the effort. That’s why we’re breaking down what it takes to manage social media, hopefully making it more attainable for libraries who don’t have a dedicated marketing team or budget. Setting yourself up for success with social media means doing some planning up front, and can be easily managed by following these five tips.

Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar is a great way to map out your social media posts. Doing this type of planning allows you to see what holidays or theme days are coming up, figure out how often you’d like to post, and what types of content you’d like to create. By planning it in advance, you can do a big brainstorm for content all at once, which can better organize the branding or messaging you’d like to put out on social platforms.

Content Creation Tools

Planning captions, posts, and videos is a great place to start, and then you’ll want to get to creating! If you have staff that is particularly interested in content creating, this can be a space for them to really explore photography, videography, editing, creating graphics and copywriting. However, that can also be a daunting task for someone who is not as well-versed in content creating. That’s why utilizing the tools that are available to you can be very helpful in saving time and energy creating social media posts. From tools that can spruce up your captions or check grammar and tone, to tools that can make editing a breeze, here’s a list of the best resources to make content creation easier.

Schedule Posts

Amongst the many options for making content creation smoother, there’s also several scheduling tools. Social media scheduling tools are software platforms that help users schedule posts across multiple social accounts. Most tools have a free version, and pricing plans from there based on your needs. For a library where you’re just posting for one account on a couple of different platforms, a free scheduling tool would work. If you had budget to spend a little more money, some tools will also collect data from your posts or offer more advanced features that you might want to take advantage of. Check out this breakdown of what social scheduling tools are out there to see if one fits your needs.

Engage

If time allows, logging into social media to check engagement on your posts is a great way to stay connected with your audience. If you respond to comments in a timely manner, it shows your followers that you’re not just churning out pre-scheduled posts but that you care about their feedback. It will help you cater future content to what your audience seems to like or dislike. It also gives you the opportunity to actually emphasize the social part of social media. Scheduling some time each day or every few days just to check in is a good idea when managing social media.

Analyze

Looking at the data from your content is the best way to know what’s working and keep the ball rolling when content creating and mapping out the next month. You can always adjust your strategy based on what the analytics are showing if you keep an eye on them on a regular basis. Insights like engagement and reach can usually be found through the actual platform, like Business Suite for Facebook & Instagram. If you’re unsure of how to navigate these, analytics tools can pull reports and data from each platform for you.