Show-notes: guest appearence on the Keeper & Curator Podcast, talking social media

I had one of my favourite professional conversations ever the other day, and as it happens it was recorded! I was honoured to be a guest on the Keeper & Curator podcast, run by my colleagues at York Helena Cox and Gary Brannan, which despite being new has already been fantastically successful (number 1 in the Visual Arts UK podcast chart, wooop). I’ve loved long-form conversation podcasts for so long, so to be actually in one and have a really great discussion was properly fun. We talked a lot about social media, about what works and what doesn’t, about exploring art abroad, and about the University of York’s sculpture trail.

I know it’s a big swing to expect anyone reading this to want to listen to me on a podcast about Art, so I thought I’d provide some shownotes with time-codes that tell you what we talk about and when, in case any of it is of interest or relevance to you. A large portion of the chat is relevant to anyone interested in using social media to engage audiences, across libraries, HE, and the Arts more generally.

Here’s the podcast:

First things first, you can find the episode Social Media and Unfinished Business here on Spotify, or you can find it on Apple Podcasts if you prefer, and probably a bunch of other places besides. Here’s the Apple version embedded:

0:00 - 2:17 Preamble

The welcomes and hellos happen in this bit.

We recorded in the Library’s Podcast Studio - it’s one of our most popular services and I’ve spent some time marketing it, but never used it before. It was pretty nice, extremely high quality mics where you feel like you can hear the blood in your veins they’re so sensitive… Here we all are, in a post-record selfie.

From left-to-right: Gary (the Keeper), me (the guest), and Helena (the Curator)

2:18 - 13:49 social media and the arts

In this section we talk a little about the personality-driven social media that Helena does via the Art@York profiles, which I think is absolutely brilliant. You can find Art@York on Facebook here (the former Library account, as you’ll hear if you listen to this bit!), or Art@York on Insta here, or Art@York on Bluesky here.

We talk a lot about why art collections work on Instagram etc, and I found it really interesting to explore this. I do think the overwhelming availability of everything means curation of any kind is more important than ever, and I do think we’ve all become so good at using imagery in our social media that it just becomes white noise - so meaningful imagery on social media really makes a difference.

13:50 - 18:37 can social media be taught or is it intuitive?

An interesting question from Gary prompts a discussion about whether social media can be taught. It absolutely can be (please get in touch and book a workshop!) but certain approaches do rely on an intuitive grasp. Either way though, putting personality into your comms is what builds relationship and engagement - if it’s fully corporate, people just do not respond.

18:38 - 24:35 AI in social media

I have over time become massively against using for example AI-generated imagery on professional social media, and this section covers why. You basically alienate a large part of your potential audience if you continue to use AI slop.

24:36 - 29:39 The different demographics for different social media platforms

One of the traps institutions often fall into when doing social media is treating all the platforms the same, and cross-posting content. I get why this happens, with time-pressures being primarily to blame, but the issue is that the platforms work completely differently, and have quite different demographics.

29:40 - 39:29 Creativity, music, and being from a line of artists but unable to produce visual art…

The Queen Mother, by Peter Walbourn

I hail from generations of artists, and I cannot draw a line or a circle or indeed absolutely anything at all, with any skill. My Mum is an incredible artist (our house is filled with things she’s made for us) and so was her Dad, Peter Walbourn. He once painted the Queen Mum and was struggling to get the detail of her brooch down in time for the end of the sitting. Why don’t you take it home with you, Her Maj suggested! Is it insured, my Grandpa asked? Oh, we couldn’t possibly afford to insure it, she replied… (He took it home anyway and my Gran slept with it under her pillow to keep it safe.)

My Great Grandfather was the painter Ernest Walbourn, and we discuss the many unfinished paintings of his we have in our house during this section of the podcast. Here’s the main himself at work - one of the things I like about this picture is he’s literally doing the thing we discuss in the episode: 70% of the painting is done to completion, but the sky is entirely untouched, a literal blank canvas.

Ernest Walbourn at work, probably in the early 1920s

The other part of Ernest lineage which did NOT reach me is sporting prowess: he was in fact invited to join the Olympic shooting team, and my parents have a letter from an Olympic committee member reassuring colleagues that Ernest was a gentleman, despite being an artist…

In particular we talk about one painting on my wall, of a tree, unfinished, which I absolutely loved Helena’s expert take on. Here’s the pic.

The unfinished tree painting, left

After listening to the podcast my Mum got in touch to say this was the very tree under which my grandparents got engaged! Lovely stuff.

39:30 - 52:17 My top tip for visiting galleries and museums

If you only take one thing… Steal my Te Papa techniques as described in this section! Some more on the New Zealand Lianza experience, including images of the museum in its glorious emptyness, here. Plus more on the Latvian children’s art / library strategy here.

We also discuss UX methodologies, and the benefits of having a curated art collection on campus.

52:18 - end My favourite art on campus

I insisted they ask me this question - what is my favourite art on campus? I talked about two pieces. First of all Beyond and Within by Joanna Mowbray.

Pic via the Art@York - click to see the original on Facebook

The piece I picked as my favourite was the Singing Stone by Gordon Young. I mentioned in the podcast the Alumni post on Insta of Helena describing the piece, and the YouTube shorts version is embedded below:

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I absolutely loved being on the podcast, so thank you Helena and Gary for having me.

The Public Library Brand: refuge, joy, connection, purpose, and expansion

In my Strategic Marketing training, we conduct an exercise around the library brand. It begins with a key question: what do you want your library's brand to be? What would the ideal sum-total of everyone’s perceptions of your organisation amount to? Or to put it more simply: what do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room?

From there we explore how to assess your library’s current reputation, and then talk about all the great marketing strategies you can use to influence and shape your brand, steering it closer to that ideal vision. It’s always one of my favourite workshop activities because I love people hearing the sets of words and phrases people come up with.

Some brand aspirations are easy to work with, from a marketing perspective. If your ideal brand is ‘a place of learning and support’ you can quickly come up with a strategy for the kinds of services you’ll promote and the target audiences for those efforts. Other aspirations are more challenging (though no less valuable because of that): for example ‘innovative and exciting’ or ‘inclusive for all’ are NOT going to become your brand on their own. Achieving these requires a deliberate effort to shift perceptions and actively demonstrate in the marketing content how inclusive, welcoming, or innovative your institution truly is.

I’ve never seen such a fabulous brand to aspire to than the one public libraries already have, revealed in some new research by the New York Public Library.

Let’s start with the quote given to Book Riot, which gives this post its title, from Daphna Blatt, the NYPL’s Senior Director of Strategy & Public Impact, who says the research shows that:

“...library usage positively contributes to externally validated measures of well-being. Our research found that patrons experience refuge, joy, connection, purpose, and expansion through their library use.”

— Daphna Blatt

Wow. WOW! It’s just such a fabulous set of terms. And what an exciting challenge to try and build that into a marketing campaign. You could take them together, or work on them one at a time over a period of months - the great thing about it is you’d be building an evidence-based piece of marketing. The research tells us how libraries make people feel, and our job as marketers is to convey that in different ways to different audiences - including, of course, potential new users.

And in fact, those terms are just five of twenty identified by NYPL, across three stages detailed in the full report which you can view here [PDF]. Here’s a screenshot of the page I was most excited about (with as much alt-text as the system allows):

Click the pic to open the full NYPL report in a new tab

It’s a very positive piece of research at a time when positivity can be pretty scarce around public libraries: I’d urge you to read the report, share it with colleagues, and then run with it as a way to inform your library marketing in 2025.

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.

[image or embed]

— 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

[image or embed]

— 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!