New article for Times Higher on how to get your library / museum / charity etc to become ex-X

I very much think it’s time we got out organisations off Twitter / X, and I’m delighted to say there’s a real movement happening in that direction.

Since I wrote this blogpost about how to get your organisation off X and a shorter LinkledIn version which has had a lot of repostings, absolutely loads of people have got in touch from across librarianship and beyond, to say they’ve put the 5 suggested steps into practice and are getting off the platform.

I particularly loved this reposting from Angela Hursh, author of the Super Library Marketing blog:

“Here’s what happened when I stopped posting to Twitter:

✔ Traffic to my website remained the same.
✔I felt less stressed with one less platform to maintain!
✔I regretted nothing.
”

— Angela Hursh

In order to try and reach an audience beyond my usual networks, I’ve re-written the piece for the Times Higher, and it sits somewhere between the two versions above in length. If you’ve not already read one of the others, have a look and see if you can start the process of becoming ex-X.

Click the pic to view the article on the Times Higher website

If you’re interested you can read my previous piece for the Times Higher on how departments and orgs can get better at using Instagram, here.

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. 

Communicating the benefits of UX to everyone who needs to hear it

At the 2023 User Experience in Libraries conference I ran a workshop all about comms and UX - basically my two favourite aspects of librarianship, mashed together, at my favourite event in librarianship. It was also in Brighton were my wife and I got married, and she came down to hang out with old friends while I was there and attended the conference dinner, and the weather was great - the whole thing was A+++, would do again.

Anyway, the workshop went really well and I later wrote it up for the 2024 UXLibs yearbook, which I’d highly recommend getting your library to buy a copy of. My chapter is now available Open Access via York’s repository so please do go and have a read if this is an area that interests you. I’ve put the intro below so you can see what it’s about.

(You can also find OA chapters from previous UXLibs Yearbooks on my Publications Page.)

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The introduction TO my UXLibs YEARBOOK chapter

At the end of what was known at the University of York as the ‘UX Study Space Project’, we presented our final recommendations to management. Ten months of work had gone into it and we were proposing (or in some cases had already implemented) far-reaching and wide-spread changes: new study space booking rules; new zoning for food and noise; new signage throughout the library; increasing the number of accessible spaces; creating a new ‘Zoom Room’; purchasing some interactive mapping software… We got some really useful input from the leadership team and they signed off on all the things we wanted to do – at which point it occurred to me: this was the single most impactful piece of work I’d ever done in librarianship.

Nothing else really came close – the fingerprints of our UX project were all over the actual, day-to-day user experience of our students and staff, simplifying and improving things in so many ways: it felt euphoric! But the 10 months of hard work that had made these changes possible could have been undone if we hadn’t been able to effectively and meaningfully show the value of our proposals to the audience who could give them the green light.

UX is such a complex and messy business, and it can be easy to get lost in the processes of ethnography and design. We mustn’t undervalue the comms; successful communication plays a huge part in helping our work achieve its goals, and it’s worth breaking down the communications life cycle of a UX project to ensure we’re making the most of each stage.

Part 1 is The Pitch. This is where you communicate the value of your proposed project, to get the time and resources you require to do the work. The audience here is the managers who can release funds for incentives and release staff time for fieldwork and design, and your colleagues whose input you’d like on the project. 

 Part 2 is The Recruitment. Now the audience are library users (and, ideally, non-users too) that you need to persuade to participate in the fieldwork, lending you their insight. 

 Part 3 is The Findings. This is where you need to communicate the results in such a way that you’re empowered to really act on them – it’s not UX if all you do is diagnose problems… The audience here is not just the managers who need to approve your design proposals, but wider library staff too. Keep them in the loop and get them on board. 

 Part 4 is The Legacy. Here the audience is everyone. Everyone needs to know what you’ve done, how brilliant it was, and what the ongoing impact is. Tell the participants. Then tell the world. 

All in all, UX is a comms-heavy business, so let’s explore each stage in more detail and look at some tips to enrich your UX and help make those user-centred changes your library needs. 

[Read on here]

Where should libraries go now Twitter *HAS* become a wasteland?

Or: Nomadic social media part 2: libraries in the post-Twitter age

Just over a year ago I wrote ‘Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?’ and this is a spiritual successor to that earlier post, a check-in on the current state of play - and also a Part 2 to this article I wrote about Nomadic Social Media for Librarians (as opposed to libraries).

Why is this the post-Twitter age?

There are so many reasons libraries need to think about a strategy for being ex-X, but here are the most important:

1. X might not even survive. Musk has driven away advertisers and lacks the discipline to win them back, so bankruptcy is a realistic possibility

2. There may be a charge for use soon. Even if it’s $1 a year and you can get permission to subscribe, do you really want your library to financially support a place where hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation are all spiking and the CEO is now actively promoting horrific toxic accounts and white supremacists?

3. A senior manager at another institution mentioned to me recently that it will soon cause too much reputational harm to be associated with X to justify the potential comms benefits of being there. But that takes up neatly on to…

4. It just doesn’t work anymore. Some niche areas of Twitter are managing to plough on, but in general it’s broken. Engagement is way down. It’s a haven for the worst people, and huge numbers of library-audience-type-people have left - so replies, ReTweets, just plain views for tweets are all tiny compared to what they once were. Twitter Analytics doesn’t work. The hateful conduct policy has been adjusted to, in essence, allow more hateful conduct. Musk has changed the algorithm so suppress links to news sites or posts that mention things he doesn’t like (I saw a tweet from an account with 58,000 followers which had fewer than 1,000 views, because it was about Bluesky) - so you can be a Twitter marketing genius and STILL not reach your own users with relevant content

All in all, at the very least you need a plan for what to do after Twitter. My own library is still there for now, but the second the subscription charge comes in we’re absolutely gone, if not before. The question is, where do we go, and what is the strategy?

What should libraries do next?

There’s no universal answer to this because it varies by sector.

University and College Libraries need to focus on Instagram

Instagram is absolutely crucial in HE, and not just to libraries. All professional services and departments need to get on there because it’s the only place almost every single undergraduate is on. Almost none of them are on Facebook, hardly any are on X, if they’re on LinkedIn they’re not there to interact with the library, and even email (the one channel literally every UG should be reachable on in theory) is largely ignored unless it is super-specific and very targeted.

I wrote a thing on Instagram for the Times Higher recently which goes into all the details about why Instagram is so important, lays out out some statistics, and gives some advice on how to use it well. Rather than recreating it here, for those working in FE and HE take a look and let me know what you think.

click the image to go to the article, which is free to read

Why not TikTok? Well it’s is not a universal thing for the University demographic (but almost is for the age group below), although it is a Big Deal so if you can spare the time and resources to do TikTok well, by all means get on there. But my advice would be to prioritise Instagram first of all, for its wider appeal and simpler methods for getting key messages to users.

Public Libraries need to up their Instagram game whilst not neglecting Facebook

For all Facebook’s problems (across all demographics except 55+ people are leaving FB, but so many 55+ are on there it is still the biggest social network - and daily use is consistently falling whilst leaping ever upwards on Instagram and TikTok) it remains a really useful tool for Public Libraries. It can act almost as a branch online, and Cape May County Library in the US and Hampshire Library Service in the UK are good examples of places doing that well.

There is a BIG amount of book chat on Threads, so this may be a conversation public libraries can tap into.

However, I think Instagram is the coming platform for this sector - and at the moment some libraries aren’t allowed it or are under a lot of restrictions as to how they can use it. Eventually this will change! So be ready when you’re given the green-light.

Here are some previous posts you may find helpful:

• Making the case for Instagram at your library: 10 reasons to set up a profile

• My own library’s Instagram guidelines

• (the most read Insta article on this site) A beginner’s guide to Instagram Reels, Stories & the Grid: what to post where

School Libraries probably need to focus on TikTok, but it’s not that simple

TikTok is, by far, the most popular platform among teens. If you’re a school library looking to appeal to students in your school, then here’s a good example of a normal, successful TikTok school library account in Medford.

If you’d like an example of what can happen a school library TikTok account really takes off, look no further than GVHSlibrary. They have over a million Likes so far, Nicki Minaj has commended their vibes in a comment, and Kelsey Bogan, the librarian in question, is just generally smashing it.

I love this post: it’s about ditching Dewey (yesss! In your face Dewey you massive racist) and seeing circulation climb by 600%, and it has been viewed over 1 million times! I mean, come on.

@gvhslibrary Getting rid of the old ways & embracing the new is resulting in more #students using the #library = #win #librariansoftiktok #librarytiktok #progress ♬ Walter White Rap - Mr Cool

If you’re interested in finding out more about Miss B’s approach, here’s a good article she wrote.

So why the ‘but it’s not that simple’ in the section header? Well, not all school library social media is aimed at the students. If your target audience is the parents, then things are lot more complicated - Twitter would have been good but isn’t any longer, which really leaves Facebook as a the primary method of reaching that audience. Not great, but worth doing for now if parent-engagement is part of your strategy. (The previously mentioned book-chat on Threads means it may be useful for school libraries in the future too.)

Special Libraries - Pharma, Health, Law etc - may need to spend more time on LinkedIn

The smaller and more specific your audience, the more useful LinkedIn is. If your library service can connect with every solicitor in your law firm, you’ll get useful intelligence that will prompt useful interaction.

As you’ll have guessed by now I’m pretty sure most libraries can benefit from a focus on Instagram, but that isn’t a universal truth. I’m not sure a Pharma or Law library will have much joy there. Health Libraries have more potential as there is a huge amount of use among healthcare professionals on the platform (specifically including while they’re at work, which is of course the ideal time to hit them with useful info!) but I’ve not yet seen a health library account totally cleaning up on Intagram - that’s not to say there isn’t one though! If you spot one, let me know.

What about Twitter / X alternatives like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Discord and Spill?

None of these appear to be a good place for library accounts at the current time. I know of a handful of libraries and archives now on Bluesky, and I hope they make a go of it, but there’s not exactly a flood of case studies for the rest of us to learn from. (The Bodleian are also there and doing brilliantly as always, but both they and the British Library have such immense cultural capital I’m always wary of taking their success as a true indication that the rest of will also succeed somewhere…) I’ve created a Bluesky list of libraries and archives on the platform, for those already there, which I’ll keep adding to as we go along, so the rest of us can see how the early adopters are doing and adapt accordingly!

If you’ve read Part 1 of this post you’ll know I’m all in on Bluesky as the long term Twitter replacement for us as librarians, but I’m yet to see enough a movement from our target audience towards the platform to think it is ready for the organisational / institutional side of things.

I don’t know of any libraries currently making Mastodon work well (again, please let me know if I’m wrong! I’d love examples of orgs rocking Mastodon) and the somewhat chaotic effect of the multi-server the platform has means you could end up putting in a LOT of work and really only reaching your peers, not your target audience.

Discord was talked about a lot when Twitter first started going downhill, but it longer really gets mentioned as a viable alternative. It consists of several smaller, focused networks rather than one big one, so is unlikely to be suitable for a library’s needs.

Threads is an interesting one… In Part 1 I discussed the issues with it (very small active user group, not available in the EU [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads has become available in the EU after all]) but there are libraries making it work, for sure. Check out LMUlibrary for a great example. A real problem with it is once you’ve enabled your Threads account, it cannot be deleted unless you also fully delete your Instagram. So if you decide to give Threads a try and it doesn’t really work out, your threads account will be other there more or less forever, representing your library even though it’s not being actively used.

As part of a pilot at University of York my own library is on Threads, and we have a relatively health number of followers. Our posts get some engagement but I’m not convinced we’re nudging the needle on behaviour - fundamentally I put time into library social media because I want our users to actually DO something because of it. At the moment Threads feels very much like a classroom with no teachers - all the social media admins for brands and orgs are having a great time and producing some genuinely funny content, because no one is checking on them… I sort of enjoy this, but I also don’t want to sink any time into it because whilst I could try and make @UoYLibrary a fun Threads account that people generally like, that wouldn’t actually help me further the library’s strategic aims. That is the bottom line, and why we’re on social media at all.

Spill is an interesting site that may become a viable Twitter alternative in time, launched last year by former Twitter employees and specifically aimed at creating safety for diverse communities. You can read more about it here - at the moment it’s still in Beta and there’s a waiting list to join, so it’s hard to assess in greater detail, but I’d love this one to take off.

Have I forgotten anything important? let me know below

I always encourage comments but have recently realised my Comments box wasn’t displaying properly so no one could leave any… A short CSS code-injection later and that should now be fixed - so if I’ve left out a key issue or a key platform, I’d love to hear your perspective!

Universities need to get better at using Instagram – here’s how

I wrote an article for the Times Higher all about University use of Instagram. I think Insta is absolutely the most important social media in Higher Education at the moment now Twitter has become unusable, and this article sets out why that is and what to do about it.

It contains some stats, some useful links, and above all guidance on how to use it well!

The article is free to read - click the image or the link above go to the post on Times Higher Education site

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If you’re interested you can find details of my Instagram for University Departments and Professional Services here.