So you want to be a library freelancer?

10 years ago today I did my first ever freelance work. It was for the Latvian Ministry of Culture (of all people!) and within 12 months I’d run workshops for the Bodleian, then UKeIG, then the British Library, all of whom I still run workshops for a decade later, and I was off. I went down to 90% in my day-job and started doing a day of freelancing a fortnight, and I’ve now done over 270 workshops in 16 countries for 78 different organisations.

I absolutely love it. A decade of doing it is as good an excuse as any to write about it so for anyone who’s interested here’s what I’ve learned along the way.

The freelance work benefits the day-job, and having a day job benefits the freelance work

I am constantly bringing to my day job things I’ve learned doing freelance work. The analytics apps my library uses for social media, the PowerPoint techniques used to create our Induction slide decks, the campaign structure we use for our marketing - all of these were researched / developed for training and then adapted for my work place. There’s no better way to keep on top of new developments in your field than to have to know enough about them to be able to train others! So for example, when it comes time to make a video for the library there’s several apps or programmes I know how to use - because in order to include something in a workshop I always have to have used properly it myself.

It works both ways though; the day job feeds into the workshops. It grounds me in the reality of working in libraries with all the constraints that involves. Feedback I get a lot after workshops is ‘it’s so nice to have someone talk about marketing who actually works in our industry so knows what we can and can’t do’. Working in a library 4.5 days a week is extremely useful for the training that happens in the other half day.

The creation-to-delivery ratio is bonkers and not in a good way

I have a selection of workshop outlines which I adapt for each session. There’s three broad categories - strategic marketing, social media, and presentation skills - with variations. Each of those took hours and hours and HOURS to create, and then I usually spend an hour or two tweaking content and making improvements for each workshop.

Sometimes people will ask me to run training on a topic I’ve not done before, and I almost always say no - because to make 3 hours’ of content for a half-day workshop takes at least 12 hours. Planning structure, outcomes, creating slides, planning tasks and activities, writing the booklet - there’s at least a 4:1 ratio of creation to delivery. So if you take on a workshop or training gig, make sure you book in a LOT of prep time if it’s something you’ve not done a version of before.

That said, I always tweak the sessions. I’ve almost never delivered the same set of slides twice - there are always new ideas or improvements to incorporate. Sometimes I get people coming - deliberately! - to versions of sessions they’ve attended with me before, and in those cases I’m always relieved that there’ll be new content for them…

It’s lovely to build relationships over many years. One of the things I’m most proud of is that 39 of the organisations I’ve worked with have invited me back!

The orgs I've delivered most sessions for

My relationships with the Bodleian, LIEM, the British Library, NEFLIN, PiCS and UKeIG go back years and years now, I really value that. And speaking of relationships…

The best thing about librarianship is librarians

Libraries are great, but the people who work in them are better… The community is certainly not without its issues, but in general I find it to be supportive and great at sharing. Especially in the age of zoom workshops, one of the things I love is how much knowledge the participants share with each other - everyone, including me, learns from everyone else.

One of the very best things about freelance work has been the opportunity to travel. Four of the countries below I have only worked in virtually, but the rest I’ve been fortunate enough to visit for work, and librarians are fantastic the world over.

Workshops by audience location (excluding England)

(Includes online)

Flexibility and interaction are everything

Interaction is what makes workshops feel alive and exciting. An audience full of questions and comments is just the greatest thing, and as a trainer I thrive off the energy that comes with it - and it’s lovely to know the workshop is really covering everyone’s specific needs because we’re discussing them. Sometimes groups really have to be convinced that you want interactivity, so re-emphasise it a few times both out loud and on the screen with specific prompts. I’ve done 144 in-person sessions and 128 online - the Chat is absolutely brilliant in online sessions, and I really enjoy getting to hear even more from delegates - tips, advice, examples, questions - than I do face-to-face.

Flexibility is absolutely essential for long training sessions. A session running from 10am - 4:30pm has so much potential to be elastic in terms of timings, so it’s worth being ready to change things on the fly. I usually put in more slides than I think I’ll need, then go into the slide-deck and hide material as I go along depending on how much discussion there is and what people want to focus on - then share the fuller version of the slides with delegates afterwards so they can still see the extra content if they’re interested.

You do not have to do things the way you’ve seen them done before

I can’t stress enough how it’s worth starting with a completely clean slate when building a training session. You don’t need to use post-its, or break-out rooms, or group discussion and a nominated person feeding back, just because they all get used a lot. You can, of course! But choose each activity because it best suits the work you’re doing and the delegates in that moment, rather than because it’s the sort of thing that normally happens...

I’m genuinely honoured to have worked with all these organisations below. If you’ve ever come along to a workshop thank you so much for attending, and if you asked questions or made comments thank you for that (and if you didn’t that’s fine too!), and I really hope you found it useful. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next decade brings.

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If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! And by the way, the Instagram series that was previously running on this blog in 2022 WILL return next time I post - we’ll be talking about Stories: what they are, why they’re important, and ideas for how to use them well…

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

Part 3 of the Instagram mini series (here’s the introductory part one, we’ll reference part two a little further down the page).

This is not a post about how to use Instagram well: this is a post about how to make the case to use Instagram in the first place. When I run workshops there are very often organisations represented that simply won’t yet allow the (enthusiastic, knowledgeable, social-media savvy!) attendees to set up a Library Instagram account… Sometimes there are librarians who are allowed to create the account but a little bit nervous about not being expert photographers, and we’ll talk about that as well.

The subtitle of this post is ‘10 reasons to set up a profile’ and rather than being the reasons I’d personally choose, these are meant to be reasons to give to senior managers who are not convinced setting up a library account is the way to go.

So here’s the scenario: you ask to set up an Instagram account for the Library, and the decision-makers say no. Or they say: maybe, but show us why. Below are ten potential replies, some or all of which you can try working into the conversation.

1. Rival ORG X do it…

Without wishing to be too Machiavellian about it, pointing to the success of a comparable institution who already use Insta can be useful. Not necessarily to provoke a sense of competition or jealousy, but more to say ‘it can be done by an organisation like us, and here is the proof’. (I don’t actually think libraries are ever really rivals!) It’s reassuring to have an example of success to look to, and evidence that there are gains to be had that make it worth the time it takes.

In particular, it’s worth pointing people towards specific posts, not just the URL of the comparable account itself. So you can say ‘this is how X tackled the issue of covid-etiquette in the library, and here’s the response they got’ for example, or ‘here is how Y promote their Special Collections’ - build your case with specific examples that speak to the strategy / priorities of the managers. And talking of successful examples, this leads us on to the next argument…

2. We can learn from your main account!

This won’t be the case every time, but a lot of libraries have ‘parent’ organisations which will already have a profile on Instagram. So for example your local authority for public libraries, or your University for academic libraries. In itself this is a useful precedent to cite, but it’s also genuinely useful as a way to quickly understand what your community responds to.

Generic advice on what to post can be really useful, but nothing beats taking an approach based on the evidence of what your specific audience likes - the parent org’s Insta will show you. If you work at a University you can say, as part of your proposal for a library account, ‘we already know what our students respond to most - they like video content that gives them clear instructions on how to use services’ or whatever it is you deduce from the relative popularity of the Uni Instagram’s posts.

A screenshot of a hovered-over Insta post

The actual mechanics of finding out what your audience already likes are these: go to the parent org’s Insta account on a PC (or Mac) rather than a phone / tablet, and hover over their most recent 15 or so posts in turn, noting the number of Likes and Comments for each (as show here). Some will be way higher than the average, and some will be way lower - you don’t need to be a social media analytics guru to spot trends and see what content types engage the audience most. Even for well established accounts this is an invaluable technique and I’d recommend it to everyone.

3. You didn’t let us do FB and Twitter either - but now you do

I’m sure there are exceptions but it seems like almost all libraries go through the same journey. In the 2000s they asked to set up Facebook accounts and were told no; eventually FB became so prevalent the powers that be changed their minds.

Leading up to and moving into the 2010s, everyone asked to set up Twitter accounts - no, they were told; stick with FB. Then eventually, Twitter became so prevalent the powers that be changed their minds.

And now in the 2020s it’s happening with Insta (and may well happen with TikTok also) - the same process, whilst risk-averse management get comfortable with the idea that Instagram is a) legit and b) here to stay (more on which later). So there may be some mileage in saying ‘history shows we WILL eventually get onto this platform so why not start earlier, gaining more experience along the way and reaping the benefits sooner?’

4. Instagram is the most engaged with social media platform

We covered this in detail in the previous post, part 2 of this series. The short version is the amount of people who DO something in response to Instagram posts (as opposed to people who passively consume a post but don’t press the Like button, or comment / reply, or reshare, or any other kind of interaction) is much greater that the amount of people who do something in response to Twitter and FB posts. Not only that, but libraries are part of the most engaged-with industries on Insta. So when you post, people react: that’s more important than, for example, sheer numbers of followers. It’s the first step to converting this into ‘off-site’ actions, like using resources, visiting buildings, or signing up for classes etc.

5. Instagram is here to stay

I personally wondered if Insta, with its meteoric rise, might burn brightly for a while and then fade. I was completely wrong. It is growing all the time in terms of sheer number of active users, and is predicted to continue to expand as this graph from Statista shows:

It’s also worth noting that the time spent on Insta each day by its users is also increasing according to TechJury, from 15 minutes per day at the start of 2019, to 30 minutes per day by midway through 2020.

All in all, then, Instagram seems extremely likely NOT to be one of those platforms where you invest a load of time and then see it all go to waste when the public moves on (like Snapchat was, for example).

6. Instagram is full of the younger demographic which is key to libraries

31% of Instagram users are aged 18-24, versus 17% for Twitter and 11% for FB - and in total over 70% on Instagram are 34 or under. There are a few library sectors not interesting in trying to get younger audiences to use their services, but not many: for academic libraries Insta is THE platform our students are all on, and for public libraries it’s populated by that key generation of potential library users who are younger than the overall average, but no longer children… Getting them to become life-long library users from the start of adulthood is a great goal, and Instagram can help with that.

7. You absolutely do not need to be a brilliant photographer or own a better camera than the one on your phone, to use Instagram successfully

For me Instagram has just the right amount of photo-manipulatability… Of course there are apps which allow you to do way more, but I don’t want EVERY option for editing; I just want some really useful ones. The combination of basic editing and flattering filters mean you can make the images you post on Insta look brilliant, even if you’re using a normal smartphone and don’t have a background in photography.

More importantly though, it is the subject of the image which matters most on Instagram, not the quality of the photograph. A brilliant picture of something prosaic will not get much engagement; a regular picture of something visually arresting will get Likes and Comments. (Obviously a brilliant photo of something really exciting is the best of both worlds, but the point is regular members of library staff can achieve success here without photography lessons and specialist equipment…)

8. You can now post from the desktop so staff don’t need a work account on their personal devices

Instagram was launched in October 2010. From then until the end of October 2021, you could not post on Instagram from a desktop: you had to use the app, unless you knew the hack.

That’s 11 long years for the idea to take hold that you need Instagram on your phone, and a lot of people don’t realise this is no longer the case (myself included until my colleague Megan told me about this the other day!). I’m delighted about this because I think some people, quite rightly, felt uncomfortable about having a work app on a personal device, so using Instagram instantly became something of a compromise, blurring those home-life / work-life boundaries. This is no longer the case: you can use it from instagram.com on your desktop, and keep those two worlds completely separate - potentially widening the pool of staff who feel happy to get involved with providing content for a library account.

9. IN THE CULTURAL SECTOR, INSTAGRAM USE IS HIGH

This means that there are LOADS of other libraries already there which we can learn from, and not only that but loads of museums, galleries, archives and other cultural sector organisations too. So many examples out there means it’s easier to find a model to suit the one your library would like to adopt, and means there are constant opportunities to learn, to develop new ideas, and potentially to develop partnerships too.

10. Last but definitely not least: we can improve the reputation of the library with Instagram

Instagram isn’t a hard marketing platform. (That’s part of what makes it fun to use.) What it does is keep the library in the mind of the user, showcase nice library locations, raise awareness of services and collections, and break down some barriers as to how people think about libraries in general. When used well, Insta will have a positive impact on the way your library is perceived, and help you deliver key messages. That’s argument enough for me on its own, but it’s not enough for everyone then there are nine other reasons to try above…

Good luck!

Instagram is the most engaged with social media platform, and that matters a lot for libraries

This is Part 2 of the Instagram mini-series. In Part 1 I suggested Instagram could be the thing to focus your time and energy on for your library’s social media in 2022.

Let’s talk about why Instagram is worth the time it takes to learn and do well as an institution.

3.6 billion people use social media (we’re getting close to exactly half the global population now, which is ridiculous!), and most of them do so in a very passive way most of the time. Instagram is, to invert the title of this post, the least passively used social media channel. I get asked a lot about what social media metrics matter - analytics can be overwhelming, so what should we look for? It basically all comes down to engagement rate: if you focus on that, everything else flows from there.

What is engagement rate?

In short, the engagement rate on any social media post is the amount of people who DO something with it, divided by the amount of people who see it. The ‘doing’ part includes replying or commenting, Liking, reposting, following a link, clicking on the profile of the poster etc. In other words, engagement rate shows you the relative level of interaction your posts are getting. (There are other definitions of the term, but this one - specifically known as Engagement Rate by Reach, is the one I find most practically useful.)

The ‘total number of impressions / views’ for a social media post isn’t always overly meaningful - more is better of course, but a lot of it is dictated by how big your network is already or if someone else with a large following has drawn attention to it. The great thing about engagement rate is how universal it is. Whether you have a huge network or a relatively new, relatively small one, the engagement rate can be similar.

So for example, the University I work for has an Instagram account with 38.5k followers - clearly everything they post is going to be seen way more times than the library’s Insta with its 2.3k followers, and they’re going to get way more Likes than us, making comparison meaningless. But engagement rate is still meaningful for comparison, because it is interactions divided by views, and what matters is how one performs against the other. If the University’s engagement rate is considerably higher than the library’s I know we’re doing something wrong, because the same audience is engaging more with the Uni than with us. If the figures are similar or ours are slightly higher, then I know our strategy for Insta is working well.

Engagement rates are, generally, surprisingly low. People consume social media in droves, but rarely actually react to it in any measurable way. My library’s twitter account has, at the time of writing, an engagement rate of exactly 2% over the last 28 days - and trust me, this is GOOD. My library’s twitter is a really popular, hugely engaged-with organisational profile. (2% engagement is more than 40 times better than average across all industries - to give you an idea of what is typical.) My library’s Instagram engagement rate is currently 3.56% (and that is just above the Uni’s, so we’re on track!). So if only 2-3.5% is considered a big success, why even chase this particular metric?

If you have an account with 10,000 followers who do NOTHING differently as a result of following you, this is of less value than an account with 100 followers all of whom act on your posts - after all, why are we even on social media in the first place? To inform, of course, but also to drive behaviour (in a non-sinister way) - to start conversations, to help people and to answer questions, to get people to sign up for classes or find books or click on the link to use that new resource you’ve invested in. Essentially, size of network / following is just a means to an end - that end is engagement. We want people to DO something when we take the time to craft some content online.

Instagram versus the other platforms

According to Rival IQ’s 2021 social media industry benchmark report, average industry engagement rates are as follows.

Twitter: 0.045%
Facebook: 0.08%
Instagram: 0.98%

As you can see, Instagram is stratospherically higher than the other two (more than 12 times higher than FB). I found this graph particularly interesting:

This Rival IQ graph (click to see the original report) shows Higher Ed and nonprofits as being among the leading industries for engagement rate

You’ll notice that Higher Ed is waaaay up there above all the other industries in terms of engagement, and non-profits is also ahead of all but three other industries. It also appears that less is more - three or four posts a week seems to be effective (with Sports Teams being a particular outlier here!). So not only is Instagram the most-engaged with platform, but libraries are part of the most engaged-with industries on the platform, and we don’t need to be posting every day to make it work.

A disclaimer here is that I’ve not found credible engagement rate averages for TikTok so I can’t add it to this comparison - I suspect the average would be high though.

What do we do with enagement rate stats?

So we know that people take more actions on Instagram than on other platforms. This is good because they’re proactively responding to our posts: the next step (and ultimate goal) is try and turn that into offline behaviour - or at least not-just-on-Instagram behaviour. Visiting the building, using the resource, attending the workshop and so on.

The most useful thing you can do with Engagement Rate as a statistic is record it and try and make it better. That sounds over-simplistic but it really is an incredibly productive use of your time. Don’t focus on amassing followers, or even on total views - just focus on trying to post content that people appreciate enough to do something with. Experiment with content types, with tone, with time of day and make a note of what works. If you’re current engagement rate is 0.3%, try and get it to 0.5%. If it’s higher, try and get it higher still. Make a note of the least-engaged with posts and do fewer of them. Everything else - the size of your network, and their off-site behaviour - flows from this.

With Instagram specifically, Comments and Likes are important because it’s not a democratic, merit-based platform. It’s owned by Facebook and so it has an algorithm which decides how many people to show your posts to (unlike Twitter which is pretty straightforward - if your followers are online when you post on Twitter, they’ll likely see it), and that decision seems to be influenced by how the people who HAVE seen it respond to it. So I look at the number of Likes / Comments per post, and work out from that what my library’s community responds best to, and do more of it. Every year I divide the number of posts by the number of Likes in total to get a Likes Per Post average, and compare that with the year before - if it’s moving in the right direction I know that what we’re doing is working.

It also provides a benchmark - if the average likes per post is 70, then I know that a post with 90 Likes has been especially successful, and a post with 50 Likes hasn’t quite hit the spot.

The next post in this series will be all about making the case for Instagram at your library if you don’t already have it. If you have any question about engagement rate, you can ask me a question in the comments below, and boost the engagement rate for this post!

Instagram for Libraries

If you do one thing differently with your library social media this year, what should it be?

The local knowledge you have of your library and your community always beats generic advice online - this article included - so if you already know what you want to focus on, I’m not telling you what you should do instead. Go with your instincts. But if you’re wondering about where to put your energy over the next twelve months, I’d suggest Instagram.

Twitter / X remains pretty vital to libraries, but for how long? It seems to be imploding, and people are leaving it in droves. Plus, many libraries have been developing their twitter accounts for years, whereas Instagram is still (relatively) new and can often benefit from some strategic attention.

Facebook remains essential for most public libraries, and continues to offer diminishing returns for the other sectors. I recently ran a marketing workshop for an academic library who’d lost their Facebook account through no fault of their own and were planning on starting again; don’t bother, I told them. I’d love to be free of Facebook - it’s such a problematic site and its increasingly difficult for libraries to get enough return on the time they invest in it.

Another reason not to worry too much about Facebook is it frees up time to spend on social media platforms with more impact. We only have so much time and we shouldn’t spread ourselves too thin; it’s better to do a small number of things well than be everywhere but not have time to do anything with full commitment. Which is also the reason I’m not recommending a focus on TikTok. It is the coming platform for sure: as of September 2021 it reached 1 billion users (becoming the fastest social network to do so, beating Instagram by 2.5 years) and a scarcely believable 167 million videos are watched per minute on the platform. But TikTok is something which takes a lot of time and energy, so perhaps it’s one to focus on if you’re absolutely nailing all your other social media profiles already… My biggest issue with it from a library point of view is that I can’t see a way of using it really well without the need for someone to appear on camera. If you look at @ToonLibraries (my favourite library TikTok and the best example I’ve found on how to do it well) it’s clearly the brainchild of a particular librarian with a real affinity for the platform - she’s in most videos because TikTok is a very personal medium, unlike Instagram or YouTube which can be both personal and impersonal. It requires a physical presence on screen. I’m not prepared to do that, nor ask anyone else to, so for that reason I’ve registered my library’s username so no one else can claim it in the meantime, while I wait for a suitable use case to present itself!

So to Instagram, then. It’s the third most popular social network (behind Facebook and, if you count it as social media, YouTube) with 1.4 billion active users. It is full of creative people. It is photo-and-video led but doesn’t JUST contain images. And it is, fundamentally, a nice place to market your library! It’s fun. The community are responsive. Instagram is an ever-growing site and very popular with younger people. For public and academic libraries it is essential - for school libraries it can be brilliant. For special libraries your mileage may vary.

So how do you go about using Instagram as a library, or indeed any cultural organisation? I’m starting the year with a series of posts about this: find the Instahacks mini series here.

Firstly how to make the case for creating a library profile if you don’t have one already, then getting started and how it all works, before moving onto the specifics: how to use Stories, and how to use Reels.

In the meantime you can see if I’m running any social media workshops online, or get in touch to book some training / a workshop for your organisation.

Tweeting for libraries: a handful of useful tools and examples

I ran a webinar on building engagement on Twitter during this strange lockdown times we live in, for the Living Knowledge Network run by the BL.

I ended up finding some useful tools and examples I’d not seen before as part of the research for it, so I thought I’d share those (and some classics) here, if you’re interested…

Image Resizing

Tweeting images is good: 80% of social media use happens on mobile devices, people scroll at speed - images help slow them down and engage with your stuff. (That said, I see some libraries including an image with literally every tweet. Conversely I actually wouldn’t advise this as it reduces the impact of all of them. Think of images as punctuation to your timeline, rather than the words.) If you make images the right size, people can see all of the image in your tweet, without needing to click on it to expand - which many people won’t do, so it’s good to make the most impact from the image without the need for a click.

The short version of resizing is, make your images 16:9. These are the right proportions to display correctly in a tweet. You can achieve this by using a PowerPoint slide as a template - these are 16:9 in default (since Office 2013 anyway) and you can Save As and choose .png rather than .pptx to save a slide as an image. Or, take an existing image and use photoresizer.com to get it exactly right for Twitter.

Going a step further with this, check out @nanobop’s really handy guide to posting multiple images in the same tweet. The first one in the thread below we’ve already covered, but click on it and read the follow-ups for guides to posting, 2, 3, and 4 pics at once, and the ‘open for a surprise!’ technique.

TWITTER CROP GUIDE THREAD! (1/5)

1 pic pic.twitter.com/cURbUJL3hI

— 🍬 mitch 🍬 (@nanobop) April 28, 2020

Twitter Moments

Sometimes you do something on Twitter and it goes well and you want to capture that success. Storify and a number of other tools have been great for that in the past, but are no longer available.

Step forward Twitter’s own Moments feature. It allows you to pull together the tweets of your choice into a little narrative, with an explanatory note at the top - then share it with whoever you like. Here’s a Moment I put together for my own place of work about a new space we’d launched: I used it to share all the positive feedback with non-twitter-using colleagues (and to make the success story easy to come back to later when I do an annual social media report) - you can view this Moment here.

Another example of using Moments is below - this time just to collate our own tweets and easily share them, rather than documenting feedback. We asked our users to draw our buildings, a challenge they took on so well I ended up using the fabulous Photofunia to put their images into gallery settings… This went down really well, I’d recommend trying it with your own library.

View this moment here or by clicking the image below.

A @UoYLibrary Twitter moment

Battles and other threads

There are millions upon millions of tweets every day (there’s more than 350,000 every minute…) so it’s easy for your own attempts at engagement to get lost amid the noise. One way to help them stand out is to build something more tangible and substantial than separate tweets.

Sometimes friendly institutions ‘war’ with each other on twitter - this epic #AskACurator battle between the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum drew so many eyes to it that it ended up in the papers, as did this more recent ‘creepiest object’ thread. (There are merpeople in both which are just off-the-charts horrend.) In the Library world, the ongoing good-matured spat between the Orkney and Shetland libraries twitter accounts is excellent and benefits both parties.

Threads are just a series of related tweets. If you reply to your own tweet they are connected; if someone finds one they can find the rest. You can build a thread in three main ways - all in one go BEFORE you tweet any of it (by clicking the little + symbol to add another tweet as many times as you need before you click ‘Tweet all’), in real-time where you just add your tweets as you go along - this is good for incorporating feedback and questions from your followers - and over a series of days, weeks, or even years. This example from the Glasgow Women’s Library is a thread tweeted over a month - every day more and more people found out about it and got involved, and because it was threaded rather than discrete tweets, they could find all the previous tweets very easily, whatever point they came in at…

Happy tweeting everyone.

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By the way the header image of the balanced stones (from Pexels) was in reference to a bit about balance which I took out of the post above, but I really liked the picture so I left it in, if you’re wondering what that was all about.