crystal: thank you for joining us fortoday’s techsoup for libraries webinar, instagram for public libraries:good practices for social media. my name is crystal and i will be yourhost. we have 2 guests today who will talk about what their libraries have done tocreate engaging instagram account to connect with their communities. they’ll share somegood practices that have worked well for them.
How To Create Snapchat Account, but before we begin i have justa few announcements to share. we will be using the readytalk platformfor our meeting today so please use the chat in the lower left corner to sendquestions and comments to the presenters. we will be tracking your questionsthroughout the webinar and will answer them
at the designated q&a section atthe end. all of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you havecomments or ideas to share we will forward them back out to the entire group. you don’tneed to raise your hand asked a question, simply type it into the chat box. shouldyou get disconnected during the webinar you can reconnect using the samelink in your confirmation email. you should be hearing the conferenceaudio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear you candial the phone number in your confirmation email which was also shared in the chat.if you are having technical issues, please send us a chat message andwe will try our best to assist you.
this webinar is being recorded and willbe archived on the techsoup website. if you are called away from thewebinar or if you have connection issues you can watch a full recording of this webinar later.you will receive an archive email within 24 hours that will include a link to the recording,the powerpoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. if youare tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag #ts4libs. we have someone from techsouplive tweeting this event so please join us in the conversation there. techsoup global is dedicated to serving theworld’s nonprofit organizations and libraries. techsoup was founded in 1987 with a globalnetwork of partners. we connect libraries
and nonprofits to technology, resources,and support so that you can operate at your full potential more effectivelydeliver programs and services, and better achieve your mission. right now techsoup is in the middleof their 2016 storymakers program. you can submit your digital story for a chanceto win some great prices for your library. you have until may 31 to submit your entry.and techsoup has created training resources and webinars to help youcreate an amazing digital story. learn more at techsoup.org/storymakers. all right, with that i think we are ready tobegin. so thanks for joining us for today’s webinar,
instagram for public libraries: good practices forsocial media. if you are joining us from a nonprofit or another type of organization or librarywe hope you also get some great tips that you are able to apply in yourorganization. we have 2 guests joining us today. ray delara joins us from burlingamecalifornia where he has worked at the burlingame public library for the past 17years. he is currently the library aide supervisor and also serves on the web team andmanages the library’s instagram account. amanda zuccarelli is a referenceand adult services librarian at the cherry hill public library in cherry hillnew jersey. she helps to manage the library's social media accounts including instagram. myname is crystal schimpf and i will be your host
for today’s webinar. assisting us with chatand twitter we have ginny mies and becky wiegand from the techsoup team. we will be ontwitter using the @techsoup4libs handle and the hashtag #ts4libs. we will havetime for questions throughout the webinar so please send us your questions using thechat as they arise and we will address as many as we are able to. if you ask questions thatwe are not able to answer during the webinar we will follow up later via email with aresponse. this webinar is being recorded and all of the slides, resources, and materialswill be included in the archive of the webinar which you should receive in 24 to 48hours. now in just a minute you will hear from amanda and ray about their experiencesand good practices. before they begin
i wanted to share just a few resources andlet you know again, that all of these resources that we share today will be included in the archive.you don’t have to write them all down right now. now if instagram is a new social media tool foryou or your library then you might want to start with some basics once today’s webinar isover. i’ve included some resources here to help you get started. for one, theinstagram help center, or you might want to take a free course like the one offered atgcf learn free. if you’re library already pays for a subscription to lynda.com there is a coursethere as well that you might be interested in. i’ll also share some articles that highlightsome of the great things that libraries are doing on instagram, and i’ll share that linkto the storymakers resources at techsoup
which becky has also just a shared in thechat. now one more thing before we begin is we’d like to know a little bit about you. sotell us does your library have an instagram account already? you can select your response byclicking the radio button and then click submit to see the responses of everybody coming in. now iwill also say that if you have an instagram account and you would like to share it, you caninclude that in the chat now. it will come to us and i will compile all of those instagramaccounts later on and include them in the archive. that way we can follow each other’s libraryinstagram account to get ideas in the future. i can see those coming in now. we will collectall of these and put them together in the archive so you can see them all later on.thank you for sending those in.
all right, so i can see it looks like mostpeople have responded to this question. and it looks like we have a little morethan half do have an instagram account. so maybe you are here today to learn new ideasfor how to use it. it looks like close to 40% don’t yet have an instagram account, so you aremaybe getting ideas on how to get started today. and i know for some of us we might not besure. maybe the library has an instagram account but you are not aware of it, sothat is completely okay as well. so thanks for sending in your account.you can continue to send those in but i’m going to go ahead and close thispoll now because it looks like most everyone has responded. we have one more poll thatwe would like to share with you as well.
so we also wanted to know what you hope toachieve through your library’s instagram account. and this may be for the account that youcurrently have or the one that you hope to open after this webinar is over. so you cancheck as many of these responses as apply to your situation. and once you have selectedthem click submit and you will be able to see everybody’s responses. so we will seewhat the most popular responses are here. and of course our guests today willbe telling us some of the reasons they have created an instagram accountand what they hoped to achieve there. i'll give you a few moments. i know ittakes a moment to look through these. some of these options relate to the wayyou might connect to your library users
or share library information. maybe youare looking to attract new library users. and some of these are more general,just promoting books and reading, promoting libraries in general, or connectingwith community organizations and other libraries. we can definitely see some of these risingto the top. if you have “other,†of course you can type that into the chat. i see one responsejust came in, “just to get more teens involved†with your library, or “to improvehigher participation†in your programs. those are great reasons as well. soagain, just another few seconds here on this poll. i’ll give you a chance tosubmit your responses and i’ll close it down and take a look at the summary in 5, 4, 3,2, and 1. we got a few last responses in here
right at the end. so taking a look at these wecan see that definitely promoting library services and programs, connecting with libraryusers, and attracting new library users are the top 3 responses. and we also gotalmost 75% for staying current and relevant which is definitely something that i thinkin the library community we want to do is stay current with technologyand social media practices. so thank you for sharing your responses they are.so it’s great to see all of the interest today. and the last thing i will say before handingthings over to amanda is that i just hope that wherever you are at with instagram in yourlibrary that you walk away with a few new ideas today to apply to your library’s instagram account.but now i am going to hand things over to amanda
so she can tell us about what they have beendoing at the cherry hill public library. amanda? amanda: hi everyone. so i wanted to start offand give you guys a little bit of information about cherry hill. we are a stand-alonelibrary and we serve a very large community. our population is about 70,000 and we arelocated 20 minutes away from philadelphia. first thing i want to share with youguys is how our library uses instagram. and what we first did is set up alist of goals. our goals are important because that gives us a blueprintfor what we should be posting. so if you are looking to start aninstagram account, it might be a good place to start to get an idea of whatkind of things you want to post.
from those goals our libraryhas made a list of tasks. and our library also has a social mediacommittee. so it’s not just me, it’s a team. and we focus on these 6 tasks, butwe are not limited to these 6 tasks. this is just a general representation of whatwe’d like to post. 1 to 2 team members focuses on each of these tasks. and i will give moreexamples of these tasks in a couple slides. so i see a couple people are asking what thesemean and i’m going to show them in a minute. so there are 8 people on the socialmedia committee. and a way we manage it is by using a document through a google drive.this is an example of the month of april, how we set up our tasks. one of theteam members creates the document.
she gives us ideas and notes, and then wecan put in whatever it is we’d like to post if we have any ideas. so this is an example of a bookfacewhich most people should be familiar with if you are using instagram orknow about instagram and libraries. it’s a popular trend on instagram and very popularwith libraries. so when we post bookface pictures i feel that it not only represents the fun instagramtrend, but it is also a way to celebrate libraries in general. this is an example of dvds and tvshows. we just took a picture of 6 dvds that all recently came in. we actuallyjust posted this picture the other day.
and it’s just a way to let our followers andpatrons know these new releases just arrived, like come and check them out. so it is away to promote our services and our programs. so this is our junior chef programwhich is very popular. here’s a photo. our youth services department 2members of the social media committee, on the committee and they do all theposts for all the youth services events. so they try to represent all of our goals withtheir posts and i think they do a pretty good job. this is a picture of some end pages andi find that the end pages and book covers make fantastic pictures. there is alot of beautiful book covers out there. and just taking pictures of book covers is agreat thing to have on your instagram account.
so let’s move on to the next picture. these are pictures that we posted for upcomingevents that we are having in our library. and the cosplay logo actually wascreated by one of our part-time employees that posts these type of pictures. it’s a goodway to let your patrons know about programs and even people who possibly aren’t patronswho live nearby when you post your events. and this is a great picture. i love this picture.it’s actually one of our team member’s cats. and it’s a great representation ofpop culture and instagram trends. so we have a hashtag #catsofinstagram andcaturday because it was taken on a saturday. so these are things that we like to post.we like to have fun and not have everything
be about the library. we like to representthings that other people want to see. i guess we just want to have like pleasingpictures so this is an adorable picture. so now i want to move onto the qualityof pictures that you want to show and we want to show on instagram.this is actually one of our photos. i’m not sure who took it or whoposted it but it is not a great photo. it’s blurry and it’s just not a great photo.our director is the person on the right-hand side and she is a little bit cut off. but i dohave an example of what you should be doing. so i borrowed this picture fromburlingame and this is a “do.†so this is a way to may be do a blurry picturebut it is blurry on purpose, the bottom part there.
and i think it’s a great representationof what you should be doing. but don’t do what we’d did and posta picture like the one on the right. and so now i’m going to talk a little bit moreabout. bookface friday like i said is very popular. and just some tips are, it’s okayif your hands and fingers show. the joker picture on top is one of our pictures.and i think that picture was mostly a huge success because we have an employee who has greenhair. and when he dyed his hair green i immediately thought of the joker and said wehave to get a picture, a bookface picture with him. and the danielle steel picture is amazing.it’s one of my favorite burlingame pictures. again, i used an example. they havesome really great bookface pictures.
so take a look and learn from them. butyes, it’s okay if you’re fingers show. and i find that if you can lineup at least one lineit helps to make the picture work for the bookface. and as you can see with the danielle steelpicture they don’t always need the faces. and sometimes you are going to need props.so sometimes these things work quickly, but sometimes you need to gathersome stuff to make the book face work. these are editing apps that i use on my phone.they are apps that i feel most people can use that the novice can use these apps and theywill help them get better photos for instagram. so a list of the apps and what they do, each ofthem does something a little slightly different and we don’t use all of them all the time.but every once in a while you want a video
or you want to add music so they are apps thatanybody can use and they are all free to download. we try for promotion of our posts. wetry to use as many hashtags as possible. we like to tag the author if we use a picture oftheir book. in this one we also tagged fun home, the musical, and they ended up liking ourpost. so it’s always great to get recognition from either the author or someone who isinvolved with the book if it is a graphic novel, the illustrator may be. but we always try topromote the book using the author or the celebrity. if a celebrity writes a bookwe use a picture of that. for promotion we also followand support other libraries. and a great way to find libraries is justto search the bookface friday hashtag.
most libraries are doing bookfacepictures. and you can just search through and find great pictures andfind great libraries that way. this last slide is a trend that i’ve noticedon instagram. it is the book bento instagram. there is actually an account called bookbento. and if you don’t know what a bento is it is a traditional japanese boxed lunch.the picture’s in the center of the bento. and i just noticed that there is a trend ofsetting these pictures up in like a stylish and very particular manner that looks verynice. it’s all coordinated and pleasing. and the bottom 3, the one on the farright and left are burlingame’s pictures, and the one in the center, the lita fordpicture is ours. the top 2 came from @bookbento.
so it’s a good thing to look for andi think it’s kind of a fun new trend if you are interested inposting anything like that. and that’s about all i have fortoday, so we’ll get to the questions. crystal: yeah, amanda, so thank youfor sharing some of these great ideas. now i think whether you already have an instagramaccount for your library for those of you listening, or if you are starting this for the first time, thiswas a really nice outline of some of the different things you can do and the different types of things thatyou can highlight that both promote your library, and books, and reading, and all of those differentcauses, and relating back to the goals amanda, that you shared with us at the beginning. soi think this is a really nice kind of overview
of what the possibilities are. and we’ve gotten,amanda, we’ve gotten a lot of questions already. i know at this moment we have time to answera few. we will get as many as we can right now and then i will invite everyonelistening to continue to send questions in because we will have more time at the end.but just a couple of questions for you amanda, it looks like when we saw the schedule andthat management organization sheet that you had, that it seemed to be about one post per day.so we have a couple of questions around that. first of all, is that kind of your target to do onepost a day? or how many do you try to post per day or per week? and do you know of any generalrecommendations for what is too much or too little in terms of the number of posts?
amanda: we tend to do one a day,but we don’t always do one every day. so we will may be do like 5 to 6a week. but it also depends on the week. so we try not to do too many if we say we aregoing to post one and something else happens. like last thursday i think we had a scheduledpost but then we posted something else about prints instead. so if it can beposted later or at another time, we wait. but if we do do 2 posts a day, we try to doone in the morning and one in the afternoon, and then maybe we will do less during the week.so maybe that week we will only do like 4 or 5. but i think typically we do anywherebetween 4 to 6 posts in a week. i know with instagram it’s changing. ithink they are going to have an algorithm
and i’m not exactly sure how thatis going to affect what people see. so i think we are trying to feel it out andsee what’s too much and what’s not enough. crystal: great, great. and i think we have timefor just one more question right now which is – and i think this is a really good questionthat was asked about posting pictures of patrons and especially i think this came up at themoment when you had the youth services slide up and you had the pictures of the kids up there aswell. so how does your library handle permission for posting patron photos?do you have a permission form, or do you just ask for verbalpermission? what do you do? amanda: they mostly do verbal permission. i didfind out from one of our children’s librarians
that some of her regulars, she’s justaware of whether or not they’ve already either signed the sheet or becausewe do have a photo release sheet. but i think she is aware of who has signed thatat this point and she said if she’s not sure, she will do a quick verbal agreement.she also said that some of our patrons that come to these programs she knowsthat they have instagram accounts like even some of the kids and teens,they have their own instagram account. so they are like, “take a picture of me.†and theywant it. so if they tell her that they want to be in the picture then she will just goahead and take the picture of them. also she said she likes to do some picturesin a way that may, i think in those pictures
there is an example of – you can’tquite see the entire face of the child. so she says she tends to do a lotof that as well when she is unsure whether or not that particularperson has signed the release or if they would beuncomfortable with being posted. crystal: all right. well, thank you for sharingthe way that you have handled that situation in your library. and it sounds like there’s acouple different ways that you’ve been addressing it and that you know your patrons prettywell as far as regular patrons go. so we have quite a few morequestions but i want to move on so we get to hear ray’s presentation aswell. so amanda, i’ll say thank you right now.
we'll bring you back on laterfor more questions, okay? amanda: okay. crystal: all right, and those of you who haveasked questions know that we will continue to respond to those later on and we willalso follow-up via email with any of those if we are unable to get to themduring our live webinar today. but now i would like to turn over the controls toray so that he can share some of the good practices from the burlingame publiclibray’s instagram account. so ray? ray: hello everybody. i just want to say thank youfor spending the time on joining us in this webinar. my name is ray delara and i workfor the burlingame public library.
we are a small library in the bay area.we serve a population of 37,000 people. and we have about a staff of 63people and we also have a small branch called the [indistinct] branch library. i want to start first with some quick pointersabout getting started with an instagram account. first you want to pick aclear and concise user name. you also want to create a strong description foryour account. and our description is listed there on the screen shot, “books, places,people, and things. the stuff we love.†another part of your profile will be a linkand we typically like to rotate out our link. sometimes it’s a link to our facebook page.sometimes it’s a link to our library website.
sometimes it links to for example, thiswebinar was up there for people to register. in the screen shot we have a link to one of ourcool new projects that that my coworker is doing. it is a pod cast project called "me, you,we." and of course, when you start your account you want to have a game plan. and when wefirst started our account it simply our goal was to increase our presence on social media.and after running the account for almost 2 years now we have kind of fine-tuned our approach.but having these questions addressed when we first started would havehelped us out very much in the beginning and that is to answer these questions.who is your intended audience? are you going to reach out to thepatrons that already use your library?
are you trying to reach out to those patrons, orto those people who may not yet be your patrons? or are you just sharing the fun things aboutyour library with other libraries on social media? next question is, what kind of content do youplan to share? are you going to share pictures of events? are you going to share newadditions to your various collections? are you going to share video? i’m going to go littlebit more into content creation a little bit later in this presentation. and then finally thequestion is, how do you manage your account? i know amanda mentioned thatcherry hill has a social media team and we also have a social mediateam here at the burlingame library. we run ours a little bit differently. we havepeople designated for each social media outlet.
i’m in charge of instagram. we have otherpeople in charge of our twitter account, our facebook account, our youtubechannel, and also our pinterest account. and we meet once a month tokind of coordinate our efforts. and we actually started doing an editorialcalendar so we could all kind of know what everybody is posting so we kindof avoid re-posting the same things. so what do you do when you havethis new cool account on instagram? well, you’ve got to market it. and this issome of the ways that we marketed our account when we first started. we announced the accounton email newsletters, all of our program flyers, our website. we made social mediabookmarks that we put in people’s holds.
when they picked them up they had these socialmedia bookmarks. we left them on all the desks. we passed them out at author events.and we put all of our social media badges on our email signatures too. of course weused all of our other social media accounts to announce that we are starting aninstagram. we also in the very beginning linked most of our ig posts to facebook so then wewould be posting on both outlets at the same time. there is also that level of just word ofmouth. we told our friends. we told our family. we told our coworkers to follow. andof course we followed other libraries. and amanda mentioned searching thebookface friday tag to find other libraries. another tip that we used when we were tryingto find other libraries is we just looked
at what other libraries were following. and youcould simply just click on somebody’s followers account and it will list everybody that theyfollow. and more often than not it’s a whole bunch of other libraries as well. so that’s anothergood way to find other libraries on instagram. and of course, a big priority for us herein burlingame now is to engage our community and tell them that we have this account andwe are using this account to share events and special moments that happen within ourlibrary. and a way to do that is to search hashtags and start your own hashtag campaigns.and of course, get out of the library. get into the community. post pictures outside ofthe library basically getting outside of the walls to really find people.
this next slide has a couple of screen shots hereand these all relate to searching the hashtags on instagram. and instagram now, you weren’table to search hashtags through their web based version but now you can so it’s prettycool. so that first one is just our location. and i just looked that up and i took a screen shot.and it shows the pictures that people have posted. actually, none of these pictures areactually ours. they are all from our patrons and they just use the burlingame librarylocation when they posted their account. then i went in there and i liked it, and icommented. and those likes and the comments people see and then they know that the libraryhas an account. so it’s a great way to reach out to those people who are using instagramand using instagram right in your library.
i also search the hashtag, just burlingamelibrary. most of those pictures now are from us but when we first started the accountmost of the pictures were from users that didn’t even know that we had anaccount. so basically i just went back and i liked all those pictures. and thenagain, those people, some of them followed us. and then i just searched the hashtagburlingame as well. a lot of pictures show up. and it’s also a good tool for you startingan instagram account is that when you look at your location hashtag you kind ofsee the places where the community is and what they are posting. you could also postand go to those same places and take photos, and also like all them and comment.and then also, search the popular areas
in your city. that last screen shotis the burlingame avenue hashtag. and again, it’s a good wayto engage your community. i mentioned something about creating yourown hashtags to engage. this is an example of one that we did. two halloweens agowe had a theme burlingame of thrones. and we actually built a throne out of books. andwe placed it out in the lobby with a sign saying, “take a picture sitting on the throneof books and tag us on instagram, and used the hashtag #burlingameofthrones.â€and this was really a way for us to find out who in our community and who of ourpatrons are actually on instagram. and to our surprise people started posting. andthose bottom 3 photos aren’t our photos at all,
those are from patrons. and it’s just a good toolthat helped us really to see that there are people out using our library and whoare on instagram at the same time. another create your own hashtag campaignwas last summer we did what’s called the 100 day project. it actually was just anoverall instagram challenge meant for people to post something creative whether it wasa drawing or a video for 100 days straight and make that commitment. and we attempted it.we actually went and got through all 100 days. our spin though was for each post wewould post something that had to do about the city of burlingame. so it was agreat, great way to reach out to those people to find our account as an informative avenueabout their own city. and it’s another great way
to connect with local businesses, connectwith the burlingame historical society and other community organizations. again,another great way to build staff support for the account because 100 pictures for 100 daysstraight was a lot to handle for just one person. so i sent the call out to all my coworkers, tothe staff, to see if they had anything interesting that i should highlight during this project, orif they could take pictures, if they had any ideas. and we really just pulled all these picturestogether and we got this project done. we got a lot of great feedbackfrom our community as well. amanda talked about hashtags. i’m going togo into some of the hashtags real briefly. you want to participate in libraryhashtag campaigns and instagram challenges.
and i’ll go into more specifics about that later.and there is a list of some hashtags this year that i tend to use on most of our posts.again, the hashtags i think are important. you don’t want to go overboard but weare putting this content out to be shared. when you add another hashtag itsputting your picture in a pool of photos that you’ll never know if you will gain somebody’sinterest. so i would think that it’s a great idea to use hashtags for your images. an example of a great library hashtagis #bookfacefriday, and 13,000, almost 14,000 posts. it’s been pretty amazing.libraries all over the world are participating. and it simply takes a book and a staffmember willing to pose, but it’s a great way
to get your name out if you are just starting orto create content if you already have an account. this is a great example of a library usinga hashtag and putting a library spin on it. the bernardsville public library created thislibrary hashtag. it’s called library in my hand. it’s a very captivating image. itshows somebody holding their phone but having some sort of library service displayedon there. and it was a great way to promote the remote services that are available topatrons when they are not even in the library. and libraries all over again, joined inand participated and it was a great example. and i wanted to highlight this example duringthis presentation of a way that libraries have been using instagram to promote services,not even just services that happen inside
the building but from homejust simply through your device. so i talked a little bit about reaching out to yourlocal community. but also, there is a 2nd part to it. there is this community on instagram.and from my experience what i kind of did is i just dived right into it. i followed all thelibrary accounts. i liked a lot of pictures, commented, and also i followed instagram’s actual account.and by doing so instagram will post images that you kind of want to replicate. theyare beautiful photos. but on top of that what they will also do is they will highlight otheraccounts. and looking at other people’s accounts also has provided an inspiration for me toalso get ideas of what to post for the library, putting a library spin on things. soi highly suggest following instagram.
and if you have the chance to connect to otherinstagram followers. we were lucky to be invited not too long ago, a couple weekends ago tosan francisco public library for an insta-meet where we got to meet other instagramers. we gota special tour of the main library down there behind the scenes before thelibrary opened. it was a great event. so i encourage if you have the opportunity to hostan insta-meet at your library or attend one, do so. it was an awesome event and i wasvery honored to have been invited. and collaborate with your fellow librarieson instagram. we are all in this together. we are all trying to show that libraries arechanging today. we are developing new ways and we are excepting new ways of reachingour community. and just being on instagram
is a testament to that. so workwith other libraries on instagram. last year we did the library doughnut shelfiewhere i reached out to the libraries on instagram to send me doughnut shelfies, and it’s kind of hardto explain with text. it’s on our youtube channel, but we had about 18 librariessubmit to us these doughnut shelfies and it created this one big shelfie and theygot everyone involved in it was a fun project. so collaborate. reach out to your fellowlibraries in your system or just in general and work on projects together. now little bit on content creation,all you really need is your smart phone. here is a little image of what we have so farin terms of what we use, the camera, gopro,
and tripods. and when it gets heavy we definitelyuse a laptop to do some further editing. crystal: ray, this is crystal. i’m just goingto jump in here. we are almost out of time and what i might suggest is if we jumpahead because we'll let everybody know that all these slides will beavailable about the content creation. and i know you’ve got some slides in herethat talk about the video and stop motion video and some great tips in there. but ithink it might be good if we jump ahead to hearing about some of your challenges andsuccesses, maybe just a little bit on the analytics if you want to jump there. and then thatway we have time for a few more questions before we wrap up.
ray: sounds good, sounds good. solet’s just jump to the challenges. one thing that helped us out is thatthe city developed a social media policy and that applied to content that wecreated and also the comments and followers, and who to follow. so double check with your city oryour library to find out if you have a social media policy and that will help youout in launching your account. again, getting the word out to your community. andi touched base on some of the things that we did. and of course, keeping content fresh. you don’twant to overload all your social media outlets with the same thing so it does takesome coordination between your teams. and finding the time to just make the contentand managing the accounts has been a challenge.
but even with all these challenges therehas been some success with our account. and just real brief, we were lucky to be on thelist of the top 10 best book related instagram accounts. we were also featured last year inthe new york times for some of our bookfaces. and we were also recognized at ala for ourbookfaces as a way to promote collections. and i mentioned participating in instagramchallenges. last halloween we were selected as a winner for instagram’s weekend hashtagproject. and it was a very exciting thing to be featured by instagram themselves.so just some take away points, just dive into the instagram community,comment, follow, and like other library’s photos, even other instagramers, people inyour community. really get involved.
be passionate. although i manage theaccount the account would not be here if it was not for my coworkers andtheir willingness to post for bookface, or their willingness to help out with shooting video.so definitely you want to utilize your coworkers in your library. and of course, have funbecause it will translate into your account. and people will see it and hopefully theywill follow it. and that’s just pretty much it. crystal: all right. and ray, i know you’ve gotthese links here, and these we are including in the archive. there are some really greatideas here and also some conversation about video on instagram from the instagram help file. sowe will include those in the archive as well. and just to reiterate, we do have all of theseslides and there are some really great tips included.
so i encourage you to go back through those.but we want to take just a few more minutes for some of the questions that havebeen coming in especially as they pertain to what you have been sharing so far.and ray, i know you talked a little bit more about the hashtags and we’ve had quitea few questions about how to use the hashtags. and one was, “do you have any advice on gettingpeople to participate in the library hashtag?" i know you had a few examples that youshared, but was there anything specific you did to promote the hashtag itselfor did it just kind of catch on? ray: well, with the #burlingameofthronesexample we just simply left the sign there right next to the throne of books to kindof inform people that we are on social media
and to use that hashtag. we have been doingthese little projects like that scavenger hunt. and amanda showed some of those photos. andwhenever we do programs or something like that we like to try to create our own specific hashtagso then people who participate can search it and find it as well. crystal: great. and another question came in.is there such a thing as too many hashtags? and sometimes we see people use many, manyhashtags. so do you have a certain number that you shoot for when you are creating a postor a point where you think it might be too many for a library account? ray: i think you know, there is a pointwhere it could be way too many hashtags.
but i think for us we tend touse always kind of the same ones. right now we are using like a set of 5 or 6that apply to each post, #librariestransformed, #librariesofinstagram, #librarylife,#libraryburlingame and then #burlingamelibrary. and those are kind of our consistenthashtags. and then of course the other ones that we add on our dependenton what we are posting. crystal: right. and then do you have anytips for identifying pop culture trends that you might tack ontoor things in your community? how do you go about findingthose or discovering them? ray: again, a lot of it is followingother community organizations on instagram,
and also searching the local hashtags. andalso the explore page on instagram is a good way to find just general pop culture trends becausejust like twitter they will highlight the hashtags that are trending so to speak. so the explorepage is a great place to find those kind of trends. crystal: all right. so we did have somequestions kind of in between your presentation and amanda’s. so amanda i’ll have you comein now and maybe answer this one as well. and one that i think is really importantfor us to consider in public libraries especially is dealing with inappropriatecomments. so i’d like to ask each of you. amanda, i’ll have you go first on this one. haveyou had any inappropriate comments come in and how have you handled those inyour library whether it was somebody
who was just being negative or seemed to be kindof a spammer or instagram trolling type of person? how do you handle that? amanda: i don’t think we’ve actuallyhad a problem with that on instagram. we have had a couple problems on facebook.when they came in they were handled pretty much directly by our director. andshe addressed it, answered their question and then blocked them, so that theycould not post anything else negative when it came to the point where it was just obviousthat they were just being negative to be negative. crystal: and it sounds like you got a 2ndopinion from administration or managers so that’s always good to do. so ray, whatabout on your end, have you had any issues
with inappropriate comments? ray: yes, we have. that’s why on the challengesi wrote down that social media policy. so the city and the library has adopted asocial media policy and that applies to comments. off the top of my head i don’t know the exactwording but basically if it’s a dig at a coworker or just inappropriate we delete it straight out.and if it continues to happen then we block the user. crystal: all right. and i know one of thepeople who asked that question said they had very strict policies for not deletingcomments. so maybe that’s where taking a look at updating policies especially aroundsocial media might be something to consider in your library if that is an issue that you arefacing. and so that is a good thing to consider.
well we are just about out of time and i supposethat what i want to just reiterate for everybody who has questions we haven’t responded to, iknow we had a lot of very technical questions and also some that we simply didn’t have time for.we will get back to you all via email with those. and also again, we will have all of thoseresources and links available to you. i did just want to end with one last questionfor each of you though and this came early on. i know you shared a lot of different examplesof what types of content you are sharing. but what are you finding gets the mostengagement from your users, from your followers, the most shares, the most followers, and the mostviews? so amanda, again i’ll have you go first. what seems to be the biggest successfor you guys with your instagram?
amanda: i’m actually not sure. i feel like it varies.i think a lot of times it’s just what happens to be the best picture. and it also, it might also dependwhat time we post it. i think that it really depends. i don’t think there’s a one setthing for us they gets better likes. crystal: yeah, and i know you talked a lot aboutthe quality photos, so that definitely seems to be an emphasis for you and somethingthat is working well at cherry hill. ray, what about you? what seems tobe the most popular content out there for your instagram account? ray: i would say of course numberone is bookface friday posts for sure. i think its just such a wildly popular hashtagthat not only are people seeing it in their feeds,
but people are just clicking on thehashtag. they might not even be following us and they see our photos. so the popularityof that hashtag has led those kind of posts to be the most popular on our account.2nd to that i would think would be some of the stop motion videos that we do toeither promote events or highlight new books. and other than that, pictures of our communityi think are probably the next highest on that. and that is a goal we have going forwardis kind of share more pictures of the people that come into the library. crystal: all right. great. and i agreethose bookface fridays sure are fun and get people’s attention. so thatsounds like maybe a good place to start
if you are not doing that or if your library is startingwith instagram that could be a really great avenue for you to start on. so amanda andray thank you so much for sharing. we will get back to you with those unansweredquestions via email and we will be sending out that archive later on thisweek. please do stay on the line. i have just a few announcements that youmight be interested in and we will ask you to take a brief survey at the very end.but i just wanted to remind you again about that storymakers 2016 campaignand the prizes that you can win there. submissions can be sent in through may 31.and there are a few webinars still coming up on polishing your digital story and usingphotos specifically to tell your story.
so you might be interested there. alsowe have a few upcoming library webinars, one on outcome measurement for smalllibraries next wednesday, may 4, and one on may 18 on teaching digitalskills to older adults in libraries. so that’s all that we have for you today. i justwant to thank readytalk for being our sponsor. and thanks again to ray and amandafor sharing their instagram expertise. and thank you to you for joining us. so havea great afternoon everybody. thanks. bye-bye.
