Welcome to Part one of the Social Media training for staff at Pima County Public Library.

This part of the training introduces you to how social media works here, and why we consider social media a key part of our general efforts to build awareness of what the library offers.

When you write for the library's social media, the whole Marketing Support Team is here for you.

From Left to Right:
■ Holly Schaffer, Community Relations Manager
Most of our official wording is based upon Holly's research and the resulting news and blog posts posts she writes. Holly also writes the emails that go out to cardholders, and all of our media releases.
■ Carolina Caples, our Graphic Design Specialist
Carolina works with Reneé to create our awesome graphics. You've seen her work on the lovely new designs for Seed Library handouts, and Summer Learning.
■ Reneé Bibby, Visual Marketing Manager x35612
Reneé has a big plate! She creates all of the library signage, as well as the graphics for our biggest campaigns.
■ Me

Contact me and Reneé when you get stuck or have questions.

I've been managing the Library's social media for 10 years now! We started with a teen poetry forum and a My Space page, and now are on Twitter and Instagram and have 34 pages on Facebook.

Before this I was the Art Museum Librarian at the TMA, and an Outreach and a Children's Librarian for PCPL.

Before I got my MLS in 2001, I also worked at the UA Library, and for libraries in El Paso, Texas and Deerfield, Illinois. I've been working in libraries and bookstores for over 40 years.

Two of my books are in our catalog! See if you can find them =).

Our Facebook presence is deliberately de-centralized, but the choice to participate is up to each individual Branch Manager. The Manager decides on who writes for the page, too.

From there, to get access to the page, everyone must agree to create a Facebook profile if they don't already have one, and go through training (yay you made it!). Then I will send an invitation.

We've added some new Facebook pages lately that are not Branch pages. There's a chance that if you are on a team that you may be asked to write for that page as well: Nuestras Raíces, Kindred, 101 Spaces, Seed Library, and Ignite.

This is what we will cover in this training.

[go over points]

But, why social media?

The quick answer is that it is where people are already reading and sharing news, and figuring out what they will do over the weekend.

Social media adoption in the US continues to increase. My source here is the Pew Research Center's Social Media Fact Sheet.
Link: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

This is from the newest Pew Research data set (2021), comparing American adoption rates of the various social media and messaging platforms against each other.

Facebook has captured a whopping 69% of American adults who have internet access.

At the top is YouTube, which isn't a part of this training. Our YouTube channel is managed through the Community Engagement Office.

After Facebook, the next highest is Instagram, which Facebook also owns.

In addition to Facebook, PCPL is also on Instagram and Twitter, but most of you will be writing for Facebook.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/pi...

There's a lot of data here.

--What 2 platforms have the highest adoption by Hispanic Americans?

--What 2 platforms have the highest use by rural Americans?

--For what age level is Instagram doing better than Facebook?

Instagram has noticeably high adoption by people of color. Pew has noted that about half of Hispanic (52%) and Black Americans (49%) say they use the platform, compared with smaller shares of White Americans (35%) who say the same.

Note again that there's no data here for social media usage by teens.

Last graph.

Another way of assessing our potential reach is by looking at how frequently people log in. Again, Facebook has more users checking in daily than any other platform.

My source here (again) is the Pew Research Center's Social Media Fact Sheet. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/

Pre-COVID, this is what one of our marketing reports looked like . Every event is different, so our team uses our experience to pick and choose the best channels by which to reach the people who would be most interested.

We knew that the Valencia Facebook had a strong following and that historically email was a less useful way to reach Valencia's neighborhoods. We concentrated on social media, printed handouts, and the website for our outreach. Note that we can't capture what was probably the strongest channel, which was word of mouth at the branch and amongst families who grew up in the area.

Question: if you had a message you wanted to reach people who weren't library users yet, what channel would you use? Print materials? The website? In person? Social media?

Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of the tools we have available.
1) website,
2) email and
3) social media

Website: Your official, and most permanent online presence. Because a good website is a lot of work, it gives a biz or org credibility.

The drawback is that people have to remember to visit, or have a persistent reason to come back. It doesn't come to them.

We discovered while we were closed that very few people had a reason anymore to visit the website, which made it hard for us to use the website to get word out about updates and changes, and reopening news.

Then there's email, which is
very powerful in a different way, especially if you have ways to segment your list by interest, as we do here at PCPL.

Email is not "social" in the sense of a 2-way conversation, but it is a very effective way to broadcast your news.

Holly sends at least 4 emails a month and her emails have a super-high open rate: often as high as 60-90%, and sometimes higher! The normal email open rate for a service organization is 14-28%, so Holly's numbers are astronomical.

These numbers were all during the closure last year. And -- as you can see here -- email open rates have skyrocketed since the Coronavirus has forced more of us online.

Open rates over 100% mean that recipients are opening the email multiple times.

Then there's social media. Here is an example of a social media post on Facebook. Social media is different in several ways. Like email, it comes to you -- all you have to do is open Facebook and posts are right there (well kind of, more later).

But a big difference from email and websites is the voice, and the freedom we have to post about things simply because they may be helpful and interesting. In fact, on social media it's a huge reason we're there. By being helpful and interesting in people's Facebook feeds we are building community online and reminding readers of the value of the library.

Reneé wrote this post in July and if you know her, you hear her voice and opinions about the importance of fiction in her lead-in.

And her post was effective and successful.

Unlike a newspaper article, an email, or a radio advertisement, social media allows us to speak in our own voices directly to the people who use the library. And it lets them respond back.

Folks aren't going to love everything we post, but they sure liked this one.

Here's how we know. For Facebook, we get to see the data for all of our posts. This is an "insights" page for the same post we've been looking at.

This post generated 48 comments, 3 of them on our post, and the rest on the walls of the people who shared it from the library's page.

Social media is designed to be 2-way, shareable, and circulating, just like our books and DVDs. This post started conversations on Facebook, and hopefully personal learning, too.

When we catch our readers' interest there's no limit to how much it can get shared and discussed. Our branch pages have a smaller following than the big page, but can see numbers like this and higher.

The speed and flexibility of social media allow other important opportunities. For example, we can focus on our excellent branch staff, volunteers, and our programming partners, what we're reading, the new box of books that just arrived, and share that there's a voting deadline.

There is nothing to stop us from posting content related to anything in the collection that we circulate, in fact that is actually in County policy. History, nature, music, it's all possible. So, social media allows us to be a closer equivalent to the rich interactions that happen at the info desks, and the learning that happens online and in our buildings. The ability to showcase staff is especially important.

Social media is also different because YOU are involved, your voices are heard, and you are speaking directly to the people who use your library and live nearby. Social media allows frontline staff to decide what is newsy and helpful or interesting, and allows you to post as soon as news breaks.

As your branch's Facebook writer, your work is capturing the stories that would not otherwise get told, like the tiny screech owl that visited Valencia, or the awesome bookdrop decoration your coworker just made. Here, Madian at our Arivaca Library used their Chewbacca toy as a fun standin for the public. We don't always expect this level of creativity, but we sure do appreciate it.

We live in an age where traditional marketing messages and jingles are resisted and challenged. What people want to hear about is what's real, what's happening right now, and what's there for them.

They expect us to SHOW them that we do great work, not just say so.

When done well, the "human-ness" and authenticity of social media builds community and trust over time, reinforces the relationships you are building at our libraries, and complements the work that Reneé, Holly, Carolina, and I do.

This photo was taken by Lois when she wrote for the Eckstrom-Columbus Library's page, of all of the languages their staff members speak. It's still one of my favorites!

You won't be on your own in Facebook Land. I will regularly share tips, graphics (like this one!), holiday closure images, and post ideas for you to use on your pages. And Reneé and I are always here for your questions and ideas.

SUMMARY:
Social media, especially Facebook, gives the library the unique opportunity to speak in our own voices directly to the people who use the library.

Facebook has the potential to reach over 65% of American adults and covers a broad demographic.

The only over-13 age bracket that social media doesn't serve well are teens.

When we are real and human on social media we are building trust, loyalty, and community.