During the Friday afternoon session of MARAC, I presented “Social Media What is it Good For?” which analyzed my experiences implementing social media into the outreach efforts of an international poetry society and a college’s archives and special collections.
Enjoy the slide show!
Slide 1
- Good afternoon. My name is Lori Birrell and today I’ll be sharing with you my experiences implementing social media in two different organizations.
Slide 2
- First I’ll provide background on the 2 organizations in my case study.
- I’ll then explain what social media tools I implemented and the successes and failures involved in that implementation.
- Then I’ll share the results of implementing social media and discuss how successful I think this process was.
- Finally, I’ll share several recommendations for archival practitioners who are considering implementing social media at their institutions.
Slide 3
- I began working with the first organization- an international poetry society in the fall of 2010.
- Their current president approached me and asked me to consider new outreach methods for her organization.
- The organization was formed in 1988 and meets once a year as a society. At that meeting members give presentations on current projects or related interests to the poetry society.
- As of November 2010, the society boasted 313 members.
- However only 28 categorized themselves as students.
- This group- students- were the target of my social media efforts.
- The society’s president believed that by going to the forums where young people spend much of their time we could attract new, younger members.
- In our minds implementing social media tools would make it easier to find new members for the poetry society.
Slide 4
- Switching now to the small liberal arts college’s archives and special collections department.
- At this college their library is referred to as LITS which stands for: Library Information and Technologies Services. The archives and special collections is one department within LITS.
- I was interested in seeing whether by contributing content as a representative of the archives and special collections department, I could increase awareness and the dialog between the department and our users: students, faculty and alumnae.
Slide 5
- So what did I do?
- While volunteering for the poetry society- I started my social media implementation efforts by creating a Facebook page.
- The society already has a Facebook group- which they started in August of 2008 around the time of their annual meeting, but in the Fall of 2010 that group appeared to me to be pretty uninvolved. The administrators of the group would push out content- but little to no conversations or exchanges were taking place in that forum.
- I decided to create a Facebook page rather than add content to the group, because with Facebook groups- administrators must approve you to be a member before you can see the group’s content or contribute your own content.
- A group is designed to encourage communication between members and is therefore, more inwardly focused- rather than seeking out new participants.
- The purpose behind getting involved with Facebook was to attract new members. So I wanted to develop a Facebook page, which in my mind was a forum with that sense of community involvement built in.
Slide 6
- While working in the archives and special collections department I decided that rather than establish a Facebook page for the archives department, I would to add my voice and content to the established and well received Facebook page library staff had created.
- LITS staff began their Facebook page in 2009 as another outreach method. Prior to 2009, they had begun a blog to increase their outreach methods. Through the blog they posted about various reference services the library provides, events and news.
- The Facebook page serves as another outlet for that information and unlike the blog which doesn’t allow for comments, the Facebook page encourages participation.
- As a representative of the archives and special collections department I created a stock pile of posts that highlighted items and collections housed in the archives, as well as promoted events and exhibits related to the department.
- I began posting to the LITS Facebook page in December 2010. My first post publicized a long standing Christmas concert that is a tradition at the college.
- This event always draws a good crowd not only of students, but also members of the town’s community.
- I scanned the first concert program and uploaded that photo and a caption to the Facebook page.
- The posting read: Be sure to attend the 2010 Vesper’s concert this Sunday. But before you do, take a look at the first Vesper’s concert program! Photo from … College Digital Collections, part of the Archives & Special Collections.
- My posts always included the URL to the campus’s content management system, so the post viewer could see how the item I posted fit into a larger collection or the archives’ holdings in general.
Slide 7
- Returning to the poetry society, I created a Twitter account in October of 2010.
- Twitter is a wonderful tool useful for what I term as “quick hits”. In the example of the poetry society- these quick hits can be poetry quotations, biographical facts, today in history, event information, and book promotion.
- Twitter is set up based on followers and those users whom you follow. Unfortunately there is no tried and true formula for getting users to follow your feed.
- One way to increase your number of followers is to use hashtags. Users follow the hashtags of those topics their most interested in.
- When establishing followers for the poetry society, I used the hashtag #poetry, #literature and #westernma an abbreviation of Western Massachusetts because the poetry society has a partnership with a local museum and I wanted to take advantage of activity on the #westernma feed.
- I also took advantage of the @ symbol. When you create a twitter account, and want to mention another user in one of your tweets, you put the @ symbol before their user name.
- @ mentions are a way to direct your comment to an individual or organization within the Twitter social network.
- When that user looks through his or her @ mentions, they’ll see that you mentioned them in a tweet and most twitter users will re-tweet or send out your post to their followers.
Slide 8
- When implementing Twitter on behalf of the archives and special collections department, I again built on what the library staff had started beginning in January 2010.
- By using cotweet which allows multiple twitter users to access the same account and select the day and time they want a post to go out- I could devote maybe 30 minutes of my time one day to creating a stock pile of tweets for the month and then sit back- knowing my work was done.
Slide 9
- So how did things shake out in the end?
- My case study and foray into social media on behalf of these two organizations lasted from October 2010 to April 2011.
- On the screen you’re seeing a graph that shows the results of my efforts with Facebook.
- The blue bars represent the number of visitors to the Facebook page each week during the sampled period.
- Only in the last week, which was in February did visitors “like” my posts.
- Even with the increased traffic to the page during November and February I had difficulty initiating and sustaining a conversation among visitors.
- I had wanted to create an environment for conversation and the exchange of ideas and instead I found the Facebook page became a one-way street of information. I pushed out content but had little response coming back to me.
Slide 10
- In contrast, the LITS Facebook page receives on average 245 “likes” during any given week.
- Nearly 10 x’s as many users visit the LITS Facebook page as did the poetry society page.
Slide 11
- While Facebook sends you weekly statistics on the number of visitors to your page, number of comments and number of likes…
- Finding statistics for Twitter use is a bit more challenging.
- I used TweetStats to track the results of my Tweets.
- During the time I tweeted from November to March I averaged 1.7 tweets per day and 14 tweets per month.
- As I became more discouraged with the response from my followers and from the poetry society organization and officers- I began to tweet less.
- I tweeted the most in December because that’s when there are international events celebrating the poet and her birthday. I set up a google alert so whenever the poet is mentioned on a website I receive an email.
- I then decided whether to tweet the information I received via Google alert.
Slide 12
- My results with Twitter when I posted as a part of LITS was like my experience with their Facebook page more encouraging.
- On average LITS staff tweet 2.2 times per day Monday through Friday during the time I collected my data from Jan. 2010- March 2011
Slide 13
- In order to integrate social media tools successfully into an organization’s outreach efforts, you must have the buy in of key stake holders.
- These stake holders include:
- The people you have to run things by- your boss, your boss’s boss. The people who are involved in social media directly- you want to be all on the same page- not fighting on what platform to use. You also need content creators feeding you relevant materials or access to the places content is created so you can push it out through social media outlets.
- You must also work to establish and maintain clear lines of communication.
Slide 14
- While volunteering at the poetry society, I had the support of the society’s president, but not that of the Facebook group’s administrator.
- As I continued to volunteer I found out that the group’s administrator holds a lot of clout with the members of the organization- and without her support- I would not be successful.
- I also had difficulty creating my own content.
- While the society’s website gets updated with some regularity, the site’s administrators never emailed me when they updated the site.
- Ideally, you should be able to direct your traffic generated through social media back to a central information point- like an organization’s website.
- In this case, I had no place to direct traffic to through my Facebook posts and Tweets.
- While I struggled to implement Facebook and Twitter in the poetry society, I enjoyed a different response from colleagues at the college’s library and archives.
- I had the support of my boss, who despite her misgivings about Twitter, encouraged my posting to Facebook.
- The LITS staff and history with social media implementation offered me a supportive work environment.
- I had created the content I posted by scanning materials and writing captions and then uploading that content to Facebook and Twitter.
Slide 15
- Social media and on-line communication is not a replacement for community. It’s another outlet for communication.
- The use of social media doesn’t guarantee that people will care about what you care about- people have to want to engage independently of any communication tool.
- The members of your community must have a reason in common for participating in and contributing to your community.
- It doesn’t matter where you chose to build your community. The important part is that there is something around which a community can be built. Social media is an easier way of allowing a community to exchange ideas.
Slide 16
- The members of the poetry society meet in person for the annual meeting and then go on their way.
- While the organization and their interest in the poet may be part of their professional lives, that connections continues independent of the poetry society.
- The members don’t need the poetry society to feel connected to their common interest: the poet.
- Once the annual meeting has passed there is no expectation that any conversations begun at the meeting will continue throughout the year.
- In contrast, the college and the library reach out to its community members throughout the year through the alumnae magazine, fund raising efforts and news updates- all in print and on-line.
- The college serves as a central point to which the members of the community feel connected. The college as a place is their common link.
Slide 17
- The statistics rendered both by Facebook and by TweetStats lead me to conclude that the amount of content added to either a page or feed directly impacts the amount of traffic to that social media site.
- Increased traffic increases the chance that those reading your content will participate and engage with you and each other.
- When generating content, work to bring your users back to a central information point- like your website or blog. That way the content you post isn’t the end of the conversation. Users will visit your website and possibly find a collection they didn’t know you had- or didn’t know they could access.
Slide 18
- With the poetry society other than the buzz around the annual meeting and events celebrating the poet’s birthday. I found there simply wasn’t enough new content to generate conversation among members.
- I also found that by reporting on other people’s news which I found through google alerts, I was advocating on behalf of libraries and other organizations who put on events, rather than promoting the society and their activities.
- Unless you live in the area where such an event is taking place- your less likely to comment or appreciate that information.
- In contrast, the college and the library constantly have events going on.
- By tying in my posts from the archives to campus events, I found that alumnae really enjoyed these walks down memory lane.
- In March, I posted a picture of the first trolley car rides students rode from the college into town.
- One alumnae posted the comment on the library’s facebook wall: “firsts are not always easy. but 2 discover a digital archive @ my alma mater—- first of the Sisters. ride on sister.”
- This alum enjoyed the post, but also liked knowing about the digital archive where all of the content the archives digitizes lives.
- Perhaps in the future this alum will visit the archive during one of her reunions or possibly donate her papers to the repository.
Slide 19
- So social media: what is it good for???
- I have several recommendations for those of you thinking about implementing social media tools at your repository.
- I suggest that you approach social media tools a method for increasing the conversation between you and your users.
- This interaction makes your job easier and more fun.
- I don’t believe pushing content out through Twitter or Facebook should be a one-way street. Always work to create a dialog.
- As you plan your social media implementation and execute your plan you should keep in mind your initial goals and reasons for using these tools.
- With your goals in mind you can better measure your success.
- And finally, despite the seeming ubiquitous nature of social media tools- these new outreach methods should be integrated and not replace your existing suite of methods.
- We still need newspaper articles covering the opening of a new exhibit, posters announcing a lecture series and good old fashion word of mouth.
Slide 20
Thank you.