Public Library Social Media in a Post-Twitter World

Last month I went to Kilkenny to present at the Library Association of Ireland’s Public Libraries Conference. The short version of this post is, it was a fantastic conference; libraries in Ireland get a lot more support from their government than British ones and it SHOWS in their confidence and morale and general fabulousness; and I uploaded my presentation to Slideshare if you’d like to see it:

Public library social media in a post-Twitter world from Ned Potter

I was running some training online for Irish public libraries earlier in the year, and I said jokingly (or, half-jokingly…) ‘as great as this is, if anyone would like to invite me back to Ireland I’d love to come!’ and Mary Murphy from the LAI took me at my word! I’m so glad she did because the whole thing was a great experience.

It reminded me of when I ran workshops in Australia - when a nation truly values its libraries, the whole conversation around them is just different. It starts from a place of positivity, and moves forward from there into creativity and inclusivity - the capacity for those things is greater because the librarians aren’t having to be on the defensive and trying to justify their existence. Someone said to me on the coffee break ‘whichever party is in Government, we always get support’ - can you imagine that being said at a British conference? It was lovely to visit such a place and a get a sort of library-serotonin boost…

The other great this about this whole trip was that my wife Alice could come with me, and in fact - for the first time ever - she saw me talk at an event. It was odd to mix these two worlds, and I had to consciously not think about her presence while I was presenting so I didn’t get in my own head. Whenever I do conference talks I always ask the audience to speak to each other about a key part of the topic, around ten minutes in - it turns everyone in the room into active participants and raises the energy levels all round; I love it and whole-heartedly recommend it to presenters. I didn’t warn Alice about it though, so she found herself talking to the librarian in the seat next to her about things she had no context for or interest in - lovely stuff…

On the way home we diverted into the Wicklow Mountains and it was beautiful.

Thanks to Mary and everyone at the LAI who invited me, and to all the conference deletagates I chatted to and who asked great questions during my talk. I loved the whole thing - I hope someone will have me back over in 2025!

The Library Guide to Bluesky

During November 2024, the social network Bluesky underwent a significant transformation. What had been a platform where a few libraries set up experimental profiles with mixed results, suddenly became a space where many libraries were achieving substantial engagement.

In short, Bluesky has reached a critical mass, with enough users leaving Twitter and joining the platform for it be considered a legitimate X-replacement. This shift makes it worth considering setting up an account for your institution. At one point Bluesky saw a million new users joining daily: for libraries—and cultural organisations in general—this presents a unique opportunity to rebuild communities that have become harder to reach elsewhere.

There are plenty of examples of libraries finding success on Bluesky to draw inspiration from. I went from considering Bluesky to be brilliant for librarians but perhaps not yet suitable for libraries themselves, to seeing an explosion of library success that changed my mind. My own library has been on Bluesky for just over two weeks, and we've seen engagement levels far exceed what we experienced on Twitter over the past two years, as shown below.

If you’ve not seen Bluesky before, the first thing you’ll notice is how similar it is to Twitter in look and feel

And it’s not just us: others have posted comparisons showing engagement is much higher - and more positive - on Bluesky, and newspapers are finding click-throughs to their articles are way higher than on Twitter or Threads also, because links are not suppressed on the newer platform (see info on the lack of algorithm, below).

We’ve built a following quickly too, and while it’s not (yet) quite as big as our ex-X community was, it only took us 9 days to reach the total number of followers we had on Twitter after 9 years! Here’s how the first week went:

Our following numbers were helped by a very popular post (shown in the previous screenshot): a researcher’s guide to Bluesky. Being entertaining is good but being USEFUL is what leads to a larger following

So if you’re a cultural organisation and you’re either new to Bluesky, or considering setting up a profile, what do you need to know? Here’s a library guide to Bluesky: 13 tips to help you hit the ground running.

The big picture stuff

1. Learn from the organisations already active on Bluesky

You may be familiar with ‘Starter Packs’ on Bluesky - this is simply a curated collection of accounts, which you can follow all in one go. Use these to get a good idea of how comparable institutions are using the platform, and steal some of their ideas! I’d recommend pressing the ‘follow all’ button then unfollowing selectively as you go.

I’ve tried to think about what would be most useful for a nascent Bluesky library account, and settled on sector-by-sector Packs as the way forward so you can see what your immediate peers are up to, what sort of content works and gets engagement, and who is already having success. If you fall into the categories below and are not on these lists, tell me on Bluesky and I’ll add you!

Here they are:

• The Academic Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Of all the sectors in libraries, the academic sector appears to be having the most success on Bluesky so far. This is not because of the nature of the content they’re posting, I don’t think - there’s just a lot of the academic community moving to the platform already.

  If you work in an academic library, my uncomplicated recommendation is to get off Twitter, and get on to Bluesky.

  Hopefully this starter pack will provide some inspiration from the libraries already making it work. (Please note there are also three other packs particularly relevant to this sector, none of which I created: the Open Research pack, and the University Presses pack, and the Archives and Special Collections pack.)

• The Public Libraries Bluesky starter pack. This sector is starting to make its way on to the platform, although at the moment there’s a few libraries grabbing the username but not actively posting. In UK terms the two social media behemouths in public libraries are of course the British Library who have not been on Bluesky too long but have already amassed 20k followers, and Orkney who have only been here for 4 days but already past 5k! I love both those libraries and their social media output, but would caution against using them for too much inspiration as their huge followings and cultural cache slightly set them apart from an especially copyable model… I’d recommend checking out Hull Libraries as an example of a newish public library account making the platform work well. (I also see some public libraries having success with Threads, and would recommend choosing one platform or the other rather than spreading your time too thin across both.)

• The Health Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Medical and health libraries are starting to arrive now, and I’ll keep adding them to this pack as they do - it will be interesting to see whether Bluesky or Instagram are the best use of the social media time available.

I’m yet to see enough School Libraries, Law Libraries or other Special Libraries to create Packs for those sectors - that will hopefully change over time. You’ll find recommendations for librarian (rather than library) starter packs in this separate guide.

2. Set up your profile fully before engaging

Every Bluesky guide I’ve read (or written!) says this but I still see loads of accounts falling into the trap of following people before doing their profile. I get it, you’re excited to connect… But trust me you’re missing opportunities: accounts with generic avatars and no biography or introductory text are often perceived as likely to be bots, so users often don’t follow back and sometimes auto-block. Please sort your profile, and write an introductory post, before going on that following spree. It’s well worth it.

3. Get yourself into relevant Starter Packs

Getting into Starter Packs is a great way to accelerate follower growth, especially early on. It may happen on its own, but it’s best to be proactive - just ask the owners of packs to add you! That’s not some sort of breach of etiquette; speaking for myself I want to hear from you and make the packs more useful.

A very popular pack which is great to be on if possible is The MERL’s Arts & Culture pack which gets huge engagement; look locally for Packs created by parent organisations or local groups too. You can search for packs to follow and potentially to join, in the Bluesky Directory.

4. Create Starter Packs of your own that will help your community

One of the best things to ensure enough of your community is on Bluesky to make it worth your while to set up a profile, is to help that audience move from Twitter. I’ve done this in a couple of ways for my library - one is to write the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky, which proved to be a very popular early post with over 500 reposts so far, and which I’ve got into all the relevant staff newsletters etc. The other way to create a University of York Starter Pack, so people from the institution can instantly find and connect with each other.

I’d highly recommend you do one or both of these things early on - create a Starter Pack if the need for one exists, which is helpful for your community; and if applicable write a guide for that community (e.g. ‘the healthcare professionals guide to Bluesky’ or whatever is relevant).

5. Know your target audience, and create content for them (not for other librarians!)

This is essential social media advice regardless of platform. We need to know why we are there, and who we are there for. In my case, I consider Instagram and TikTok to be fabulous ways to reach University of York Students, so I’m crafting the stuff we put on Bluesky specifically for academics and researchers. Other people may enjoy it too which is great, but I’m using the account with a specific target audience in mind - and if I find I’m getting engagement from other libraries or info pros, and NOT from the target audience, I will tweak the content I’m putting out!

6. There’s no centralised algorithm so be proactive. Follow, reply, repost and engage

Bluesky is very Twitter-like in lots of functional ways: you can post up to 300 characters at a time, you can repost, you can Like, and so on. The crucial difference is the lack of algorithm on Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed. There’s no endlessly auto-refreshing content, just posts from the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. That’s it. So you need to follow a bunch of people to make your feed useful, and then start getting involved: join in conversations, ask questions, repost useful things, hit the Like button. In essence - this sounds pretentious I know - the aim is to cultivate community rather than just broadcast your library news.

The details

7. Make it accessible

Finally, a platform that offers alt-text for video as well as images! Thank you Bluesky. I’d recommend accessing Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked Require alt-text before posting and you can create accessible content every time. Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions.

8. Don’t be afraid to block and otherwise moderate your experience

One of the reasons for the notable lack of toxicity on Bluesky compared with Twitter is the moderation options are extensive and they actually work. Blocking is very powerful, muting words is effective, you can detach your own post from a Repost you’re not comfortable with, and so on. Make the most of all this baked-in protection.

9. for most libraries it’s probably worth having your Direct Messages open to all

The point above about moderation notwithstanding, ideally users should be able ask you questions via a DM even if you don’t follow them. The toggle-switch you require to enable this is not in Settings, but rather in the Chat area itself.

10. The question you need to ask yourself as a social media admin is not: what should I post about my org? It’s: what is my community interested in?

Often the best way to build community online is to post a mixture of things about your organisation, and things relevant to or adjacent to your organisation. For example, this post was popular among our target audience because it was about York - there was no informational or promotional message involved, and that’s fine.

We’re back! Today in #York aesthetics news, today’s vibe is rainsoaked but sunny.

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 10:29 AM

11. Don’t be afraid to explore ideas in a bit more detail

Brevity is great but it’s not the be-all and end-all - threads work well here. As well as posting a link to our Researcher’s Guide we also explored the contents in a thread and that really helped increase engagement.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

12. Posting first thing is probably best avoided

You often get organisations posting 8:30 - 9:30 in the morning because it’s the only time the person doing the social media has any time (and as yet Bluesky lacks an in-built scheduling tool) but in my experience so far, it’s best to wait until later in the day as more people seem to be around. At least give it until mid-morning to post anything important, if you can.

13. Images are important, despite this being a (rare) text-based platform

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not essential like they are on Insta - but if you can add context or character to a post using a picture or video, do so. Engagement will likely be higher.

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I hope the above is helpful, and I also hope it doesn’t make anyone feel pressured to get onto Bluesky if they’re not ready! It seems to be staying the course as a platform and growing all the time, so if you need a few months to get permission and management buy-in and ideas together and all that stuff, it will still be here waiting for you when you’re properly ready. (And of course, if you want a bespoke workshop on it, get in touch with me…)

There are various versions of this guide aimed at different audiences. If you’re looking at Bluesky more as an individual, this blogpost on ten top tips for joining may be helpful.

I’ve already mentioned the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky above - a leaner, more efficient and less Yorky version of this appears on the LSE Impact Blog here and lots of people have said the tips apply to more than just researchers and academics.

I may yet produce a Uni Department’s Guide to Bluesky just to complete the set, but for now do leave a comment or get in touch if you have any further advice to add, or any questions.

And finally, whilst I have some caveats when recommending Bluesky to libraries (especially if you’re not an academic library) I really have no hesitation in recommending it to librarians and anyone who works in libraries. It’s proving in some ways to be better than Twitter ever was, and I really value the community there. If you haven’t already, join us!

The Spotify-Wrapped Library Marketing Hack

If your library is hot on protecting user-data and privacy, there’s a great opportunity coming up to tie in some marketing with Spotify Wrapped. I’m sure you’re familiar - Spotify extensively mines your usage date over the last year and gives you a nicely packaged graphic summary of it - which many, many people tend to share their version of on social media.

In marketing terms, it's often easier (and more productive) to join in an existing conversation than to start a new one, so the idea is simply to produce a Library Wrapped which cannot give any useful info on what patrons read and did, because WE take user data and privacy seriously. We get the social currency of the Spotify wrapped discourse, and also get to make a useful (and, I think, not widely known) point about libraries being a real outlier these days in actually protecting, rather than exploiting and shilling, user data.

I made a mock-up of the sort of thing I mean, based on the visual style of a previous Spotify year. (And it goes without saying, this is an example with fictional categories to illustrate the idea - obviously you need to be on rock-solid ground with any claims you make about user-privacy at your actual library, so only say things you know are true!)

A mock-up of what a Library Wrapped might look like

I searched for library wrapped examples to see if anyone was already doing this - quite a lot are doing it with total visitor stats etc rather than the privacy angle, like this example from Pembroke, and I think that works too.

I did find one library who has already done my suggestion above, and frankly much better than my mockup! Albany Public Library posted this back in 2021:

Anyway: providing, as mentioned above, you’re completely confident in your claims, make the most of this opportunity to get some advocacy and marketing out into the world!

It's time: how to get your organisation off Twitter / X

In previous posts on becoming ex-X I’ve stopped short of saying *everyone should* leave the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Mainly because people have built up networks which may not be re-creatable elsewhere, and they were there before Musk came along, so why SHOULD they have to move? But recent events have made me question this, especially when it comes to libraries, museums, archives and Higher Education.

I saw this post from Kevin Gannon on BlueSky which sums it up about right:

I have been leery about unilateral declarations on what people should or shouldn't do about Twitter, bc I know there are networks that have been built there which are irreplaceable. But at this point, I just don't see any way one can ethically use that site. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

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— Kevin Gannon (@thetattooedprof.bsky.social) Aug 7, 2024 at 15:15

Musk is actively encouraging division, and helping to incite riots. He’s spreading far-right conspiracy theories. He’s talking about civil-war in the UK. There is simply no other circumstances in which our organisations would be complicit in using, and therefore encouraging use of, a platform whose owner not only espouses such dangerous views but uses the platform itself to amplify them. Our presence on X is an implicit endorsement. We shouldn’t be there.

So how do you get off Twitter? For what it’s worth here’s what I’ve done with my library.

1: Set a date, and tell people

As tempting as it is to leave now, we need to give our users time to hear that we’re leaving, digest this, and make alternative plans to get news from us. In January this year I decided @UoYLibrary would leave Twitter by the end of August, so we had a clean break for the new academic year.

The long lead-in time has been helpful. I wrote a briefing paper for senior leadership in February explaining why we were doing this, and shared it with the comms group, which led to some really good suggestions as to how to mitigate the impact, more on which below. We also announced our intention to leave Twitter on Twitter itself in July, so our audience there had time to get used to the idea and follow us on alternative platforms. It says it in our bio as well as our pinned tweet.

We’ve since reposted about this news, and have now done a nice little ‘favourite twitter moments’ round-up thread of some semi-viral tweets and nice interactions we’ve had over the years. These were nice to revisit in and of themselves - we’ve loved being there for 99% of the time - and will also serve to get the word out to more Twitter users before we go.

2. Consider creative ways to mitigate the impact on your Twitter audience

What do we lose by leaving Twitter? You can think about it in terms of both content (we tweet about this, and that) and audiences (those people will be fine because they follow us on Insta, these people won’t because they don’t see messages elsewhere).

Content-wise, we’ve had some lovely creative times with Twitter over the years, but as it’s become more broken and less functional we’re really reduced use of it to basic status updates - building A is closing early today, resource B is now available, service C launches today etc. So we’ve built a library status page (which we’re encouraging people to bookmark) that tells them this info without needing Twitter.

@uoylibrary So is #SatisfyingLibraryUpdates going to catch on? Well here’s one: with info on student curators, 24/7, a new exhbition and our sensory rooms which are opening soon. #unifyork #library #sensoryrooms #libinspo #librariesoftiktok #studytips #UoYTips #satisfying ♬ original sound - Uni of York library

We use Instagram Stories (see the pinned examples on our profile here) to say the sort of things we’d previously have put in Tweets, and occasionally use TikTok for general updates too, so of course we’re encouraging our Twitter audience to follow us there if they use those platforms.

[Sidenote: I’ve invented - actually I’m sure I didn’t really invent it and lots of people to do this - a way to get news updates via the video medium called ‘satisfying updates’ where I use the duet function on TikTok to give the students something satisfying to look at whilst sticking around long enough to hear key updates from me…]

Then we come to audience - in very simple terms almost all of our undergraduates are on Insta and TikTok between them so we know they’re well covered. PGTs are increasingly on Instagram too, and more and more Researchers are heading there. Academics are, for us, the problem audience that we can’t reach easily without Twitter - they’re not all going to the same place when they leave Twitter, and while BlueSky shows promise it isn’t there yet in terms of a critical mass of York academics using it. So we’ve spoken to the central University comms team and asked if they’d be willing to tweet perhaps three or four really important things about the library each year (things like 24/7 opening for exams) which they’re happy to do, and we’ll make sure our more internal marketing routes, such as the ones offered by the Faculty Librarian Team I co-manage, step up too.

Obviously your audiences may be completely different to ours if you’re not an academic library - so use all the data you have to try and work out which demographic is most reliant on Twitter for info about your org, and see if there’s any other way to reach them. Don’t rule out non-social media options too - one of the things we’re going to do is put more posters up in the colleges where all the PGRs are!

3. Make sure you turn off Grok data sharing

Twitter recently activated an on-by-default, unannounced, data-sharing setting where everything you’ve ever tweeted can be used to ‘train’ Grok, Twitter’s stupid LLM AI bot thing. You don’t want that. No one wants that. Get it in the bin.

If anyone's wondering how things are going on the hellsite: This setting was just turned on by default for everyone. if you still have an account with content, go log in and disable this so Grok can't use your tweets as training data. Direct link: twitter.com/settings/gro...

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— Corey (@coreyjrowe.bsky.social) Jul 26, 2024 at 03:17

Here’s the direct link to the Settings to turn data sharing off - it works on desktop but not, I hear, on mobiles.

4. keep the account

I’ve wrestled with this a bit - any social media account that is out there in the world is, in effect, a front window for your organisation. So keeping an account alive even when it’s not active is problematic - people may still send DMs which will go unanswered; people could find old tweets and reply to them and we wouldn’t see it, etc. However, I don’t want to lose the account name and let someone else take it and potentially impersonate the library, and there is of course a tiny, tiny possibility that Twitter may one day be habitable again, so I’ve decided it’s better to keep the account.

A final decision I need to make on this whether to lock it when we leave. At the moment I’m leaning towards locking, to reduce the chances of new people seeing the account, missing all the ways we’ll try and flag that it’s not active, and then trying to get help or guidance we can’t give by asking questions on the platform. Which brings us to…

5. Make it really, really obvious the account is no longer active

Subtlety is not your friend here. I’ve seen professional accounts who’ve left without changing their bio - we really need to make it unquestionably obvious we’ve left.

Here’s what I did with my own account when I left Twitter:

So that checklist of ways I’ve tried to flag I’m not there, in full:

• Says it in my name

• Says it in my bio

• Says it in the banner pic

• Says it in the pinned tweet

I must confess I don’t know if this has worked or not, because I’ve not logged back in since I left. I tried recently, to disable to the Grok AI LLM thing mentioned above, but it requires 2FA I can’t get without logging in, so I’m stuck… I don’t know, therefore, if there are loads of DMs or people @ing me and thinking I’m rude for not replying - I hope there aren’t, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid that. I’ll be doing the same with @UoYLibrary in a couple of weeks.

finally: How much do we explain why we’re leaving?

A decision I’ve not yet made is, do we write a library news post where we fully go into the details of why we’re leaving? I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this, if you fancy leaving a comment below.

Obviously the pro is, we’re a library, we’re taking an ethical stance, and we want our users to know about it. We want them to get the reasons why. I was speaking to a librarian at another organsiation whilst doing some social media training recently, and she said as a parent she’d be really proud of her kid’s University doing this.

The con is, quite honestly, opening up the possibility of a prolonged debate with some Musk fans, and using up comms bandwidth we REALLY need for other things on the sort of conversations where everyone gets angry but no one changes their mind. (Classic Twitter-these-days conversations, in fact.) It’s also hard to talk about why you’re leaving without sound judgemental towards the people choosing to stay, and we have no wish to be judgemental. So as of right now, I don’t know if there’ll be a big rationale-reveal type post, or we’ll just leave it at ‘Twitter is no longer working for us’.

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Since we announced we’re leaving Twitter we’ve not had any negative feedback about it. We left Facebook a couple of years back - with not a single complaint from anyone - and it is genuinely freeing to be on one less platform. As pretentious it sounds, social media benefits from your creative energy needing to be split fewer ways, in my experience. I was confident becoming ex-X was the right thing to do for our library when I first decided it at the start of year, and I’m still confident now - what’s more we’ve done some really useful things to lessen the negative impact on our users.

I’d recommend taking the steps above, and doing the same. If anyone is interested in the rationale briefing paper I wrote for our Leadership Team send me an email and I’ll share it with you; here’s how it ends.

By stopping our use of X from September, we will be upholding our values, adapting to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more impactful communications. 

Library marketers! Don't fall into the trap of thinking TikTok is just a young person's platform...

There’s some really interesting data I’d like to present in this post for your perusal, so I’m going to put it at the top as a sort of tl;dr version - but obviously please do carry on reading for the context of why it matters!

So here it is. Broadly speaking, we think of Facebook as being for older people, Insta and TikTok as being for younger people, and Twitter* for being somewhere in the middle - the sweet spot for that 25-34 demographic. However:

Twitter has around 127 million users aged 25-34, where as TikTok has 256 million users aged 25-34. In other words there are more than twice as many 25-34 year olds on TikTok (the young person’s platform) than there are on Twitter (the 25-34 year old’s platform!).

Remarkable, eh? But why does this matter? Recently I was working with a library on their marketing, and asked them if they'd considered using TikTok. No, came the reply: our average user is 28 years old, an age more associated with Twitter demographics.

First of all, kudos to the institution for a) knowing useful demographic data and b) using it to inform their decision-making! We all need to do more of that.

However there's a risk that we can let the dominant narratives about social networks disguise important insights: in this case, the idea that TikTok is full of young people (which it is) obscured the fact that there are SO MANY people on the platform overall that it's useful library marketing for all age-ranges.

These days accurate Twitter user-figures are hard to find, but here's what I discovered via Statista. There are around 335 million users of the platform, a massive 38% of whom are in the 25-34 age bracket. So: 127 million people in the age range for the target 28 year old. And no other social network that I looked into had such a high percentage in this particular group: so far, so good for Twitter.

However! Whilst only 16% of TikTok users are in the same 25-34 age-range, that's 16% of 1.6 billion users - this amounts to 256 million people in total. In other words *twice as many 28 year olds are on TikTok than are on Twitter.*

Only 8% of TikTok users are aged 35-44 like me (I am clinging on to that age-range for another few months before I get promoted to the 45+ one!) but in my own experience if feels chock-full of them... I drum for a band that exclusively plays 90s Dance music - trust me when I say, people aged 35-50 love it but it's of very little interest to anyone younger! And yet we do very well on TikTok (more so than Insta or Twitter or Facebook) because it turns out, there are a lot of nostalgic people in their 40s on there, who want to see a band play the song Renegade Master live on stage (42,000 views and counting) 😄

Anyway. The point is that TikTok is an option worth considering (in the long term its battles with the US Government may, or may not, change that) even if you don't consider your library's key demographic to be especially youthful. It's always worth looking deeper at the numbers behind the narratives, and how they relate to YOUR library community.

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*I'm just not going to say X. I'm not going to say X, formerly Twitter. It's too annoying. I'm just going to say Twitter, forever.