Everyone is posting pictures of words to Instagram... and nobody should

Part 5 in the Instagram Series. Read Parts 1 - 4 are here. If you want. No pressure.

If there’s one social media rule that is universal across platforms, industries and sectors, it’s this:

Learn what your audience likes, and do more of it.

The other side of this coin is, of course, to do less of what your audience doesn’t engage with. It’s incredibly easy to follow these maxims; you don’t need pay for any tools or be an analytics guru. Just click on your posts and compare their views / reach / impressions and you’ll quickly learn what works for your community, and what doesn’t.

With that in mind, cultural orgs please, please, please:

I see it happening all the time and it never gets engagement - which means, essentially, almost no one sees the message. You know the sort of thing - photos of book covers, or motivational quotes, or graphics, or photos of signs, or ‘resource of the week’ posters. And in every single case, there’s a massive drop in Likes compared to when they post ‘captured’ images (rather than created ones) of buildings, or spaces, or interesting objects.

If you visit any Instagram profile on a PC (rather than on your phone) you can hover over a post to see how many Likes it has so you can see for yourselves. Go to literally any library, HE or museum Insta account and do some hovering. A new account still finding its feet might get 20 Likes for a picture of a building, but only 4 Likes for a Picture of Words. A really, really successful account with a big following might get 200 Likes for a Picture of Words! But hover over the captured picture of the interior of their building next to it, and you’ll see that has 780 Likes. It’s the same everywhere.

Why does it matter?

In short: if you want a message seen, it needs engagement from your followers because Likes equal Reach.

Instagram is not as straightforward as Twitter. If you follow me on Twitter and I post at 1pm and you’re online at 1pm, you’ll see my post. Instagram is a lot fuzzier, and will not just show your posts to your followers in a simple way - the more people engage initially, the more of your followers will see it.

Likes, Comments and Shares are vital as the more you get, the more people Instagram’s algorithm will show your post to. A really important message about the library closing early simply won’t reach anyone if it’s just a screenshot of the words ‘the library is closing early today’ because no one will hit Like. So no one knows you’re closed early!

Have a look at this comparison from my library’s Insta account. This isn’t quite a full ‘pictures of words’ because we don’t post any, but it’s an example of an unsuitable picture for Instagram and shows you the impact engagement has on reach. For various reasons that I won’t bore you with now, I posted a picture of a case that I absolutely knew wouldn’t get much engagement. It’s a great photo but it’s not OF the kinds of things our audience respond best to, so as a result it got a very low number of Likes. Next to it is a more regular post, of our buildings looking dramatic at night, which got many more Likes.

The heart symbol represents Likes, the Quote symbol is Comments, the Arrow symbol represents people Forwarding the post, and the Bookmark symbol is people saving the post to their Favourites.

The key thing to look at is of course Accounts reached: 392 for the case, and 834 - over twice as many - for the building. So it’s not just a bit of a shame we didn’t get more Likes for the briefcase post; it’s ineffective communication that is only getting to a fraction of the target audience.

We all have key messages. We all have things which we need our audiences to hear. Not all of them have suitable visual metaphors. So how do you get those messages out?

Use Stories Instead

Option 1 is to take the words and put then into a Story.

Words work fine in Stories, people expect them. Especially anything time-sensitive, pertaining to events that day - just use a Story to spread the news.

The more you use Stories (for the kinds of things you might use a tweet for) the more your audience comes to expect you to use them and looks out for them.

When we ask our students how they get updates from the Library, every single undergraduate - every one - says Instagram Stories.

Here the BL are using several Stories in a row for a larger narrative - most users are happy to tap through a few Stories in a row if your message is too long to fit in one screen

Remember Stories can have URLs in, unlike Grid posts - so you can post a few words and a link to more information

A classic Not That Interesting But Still Important post, which wouldn’t work on the Grid but is perfect for Stories

Use the caption

Option 2 is simply to pair the message with a good picture and more people will see it. Obivously Instagram is a visual medium but you can use the caption for detailed info if the situation warrants it - just phrase it in an engaging way!

Does the picture have to match the news in the caption? No it doesn’t. It’s better if it does, but it’s not essential - what’s essential is choosing a pic people will Like, so more people get the news you need them to hear.

Here’s an example from my library of using a pic for reach, but the caption to deliver important messaging. I was so pleased with this picture when I took it - the colours were just good that day with the bright sun and blue skies and green grass - that I didn’t post it right away, I saved it for exactly this kind of situation where we needed Reach.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Post multiple images, and keep the words of the ‘front cover’…

Option 3 is to get creative by smuggling Pictures Of Words in as part of a post with multiple images. Here’s an example of this - I took a nice picture of the library in the sun, and then used multiple further pictures with words on, and the caption, to tell the audience the info I needed them to know. It got lots of Likes and so lots of people saw it - which absolutely would not have been the case if I’d just posted the Zones-related graphics.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Here are the Insights for that picture. As you can see the accounts reached figure is higher than the previous examples - 1,428 - because of the higher levels of engagement. It’s not just the 160 Likes, it’s the fact that 36 people Bookmarked it, 74 people visited our profile after viewing the picture.

You can also see that 32% of the views were from people who weren’t following us, and that 36 people followed us directly as a result of seeing this post - so Reach helps you find users who didn’t yet know you were on Instagram, as well as ensuring as many existing followers see key messages as possible…

I really hope I’ve convinced you not to post ‘created’ images or pictures of words from now on! If you’ve been doing so up till now don’t feel bad, because EVERYONE does it. But do yourself a favour, reach more people, and do more of what your audience likes.

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I’ve run a lot of in-house workshops for various cultural organisations, in which I audit their social media and come up with recommendations, working with staff on what they feel comfortable implementing. If you’d like to discuss social media training, get in touch!

Instagram guidelines for libraries

After a brief departure last time to mark the 10th anniversary of my becoming a library trainer, this time we’re back to the Instagram Mini Series. Click that link for the previous 3 entries, all of which focus on why to have an account.

Sharing our own Insta guidelines

For this post we’re moving on from the Why to the How. Specifically, how my library - @UoYLibrary on Instagram - does things: an org approached us and asked to share our internal guidance doc with them, and after some discussion amongst ourselves (and a senior manager) to check everyone was comfortable with this, we did so.

At that point we thought why not share them more widely for anyone else who is interested? So here they are - there are some caveats and context below but if you just want to see the doc, this is the doc:

>>> University of York Library’s Instagram Guidelines.

There’s a lot of stats towards the end of this post on the impact adopting these principles has had on our own account, but in short, using these guidelines we’ve increased our Instagram reach by 1149% in 12 months. This stuff really works!

The caveat

This is an internal doc. It’s literally just the guidance I wrote for York staff who help me do the Instagram. So that means it’s not a definitive all encompassing guide! There are probably things we’ve talked about internally which everyone knows, so it’s not codified here. Also, we’re an academic library so it may be skewed towards that sector. Generally speaking though, I think pretty much everything here is applicable to any non-profits using Instagram.

Another small caveat is, I’m not trying to present York’s Insta as the finished article, the account to which everyone should aspire… We’re still learning, still improving, still trying to increase our reach. We don’t nail everything, we still post things people don’t respond to. We’re a work in progress, and this post is really about how to make that progress happen.

The context

Our Instagram was created in 2016 by a Comms Team rather than by us in the library. We finally got control of it ourselves in mid-2017. From that point on it went okay, gradually building up followers and levels of engagement but not setting the world on fire.

From the time of the pandemic starting, I started to spend much more time actively involved in the social media rather than just writing the guidelines, and our Instagram use increased accordingly. We posted a lot more to the Grid, essentially tried harder and, frankly, started to do more of the things I was always telling other libraries to do in social media workshops. It worked well, but it was still very much in the shade of our Twitter account, and not quite hitting the heights we wanted.

Exactly a year ago, I decided that we needed to invest more time in Instagram and make it work better.

Instagram is absolutely essential for reaching undergrads

It is THE communication channel on which to get messages to undergraduates, nothing else comes close. Our Twitter was doing really well and was where we put the most time, and all that time paid off with lots of growth and engagement - but I did some follower analysis and, at least among those who engaged by replying and quote-tweeting us, it was clear that our audience there primarily consisted of PostGrads , Researchers and Academics. So our key social media messages were not getting through to UGs, and Insta is the answer to that problem.

In 2021 I co-presented at an event with Liverpool Uni Library, whose social media really is something of a gold standard in academic libraries, and before the event we chatted on zoom - they had grown their Instagram massively in recent times, which made me think perhaps we could do the same. So I asked my colleague Rebecca Connolly to go on a little fact-finding mission and check out Liverpool, Glasgow and other Uni libraries with good Instagram engagement went about their business and what we could learn. Rebecca produced a brilliant report and we set to work on transforming our Insta into something much more effective for getting key messages out to UGs in particular - a process which is still ongoing.

How we changed our Insta

Some things we tweaked right away, like following more York based accounts, and using Stories a lot more. Using Stories is key and I really feel like it was something I didn’t understand well enough before Rebecca became involved with the account at York; she is an essential part of the progress we’ve made. Stories are so good for newsy items, and the more success you have with Stories the better things seem to go on the Grid too.

Other things evolved over time, like avoiding the use of words and graphics on the grid (only using them on Stories), and making sure to pair big announcements in the captions (NOT the picture) with visually arresting pictures of the library.

If you’ve not read the guidance doc linked at the top of this post, have a look - we basically did all the things in that document! In addition to all that, we’ve created and posted a lot more Reels (you can see all our Reels videos here), and also tried some fancy split photography, that involves dividing a wide-angle shot up into even squares so it can be seamlessly swiped through. Here’s an example of that I posted yesterday which I really like…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

The results: our increased Instagram engagement

With any kind of social media, I’m always looking for engagement rather than follower numbers. I want more followers of course - a larger audience of students and staff for our key messages - but they come naturally as a by-product of posting stuff which gets engagement. So for Instagram I’m looking at Likes, Comments, Shares, and Reach, and hoping that if we increase those our followers will increase at the same time.

As it happens, our followers have increased by about a thousand people in the last twelve months. That’s great. More excitingly for me, is that the number of Likes has gone up 42%, despite us posting slightly less frequently overall, so the Likes Per Post has actually gone up 69% - in essence meaning we’re posting stuff the students actually respond to, more of the time. Over 2 years, our total number of Likes have increased by over 350%.

Shares are way up, and Comments also increased which is great because we want that interaction and chance to answer questions - up over 600% over the two years. What isn’t captured by the analytics is the amount of DMs we’ve had - either just messages out of the blue or responses to questions in our Stories. I can’t get figures on this without manually counting but the increase is huge - people love feeding back one-to-one on Instagram.

The reach is the thing that most amazed me though - an increase of over one thousand percent in the 12 months is just fantastic. And the reason is because if people don’t Like your posts, Instagram doesn’t share them widely - so now we’re posting content that gets engagement, a much higher proportion of our followers are seeing our posts. This means our key messages are reaching more undergraduates, and that was the whole aim of this focused attempt to increase engagement.

Like with all social media, the key thing is to learn what your particular community responds best to, and do more of it.

Finally… Do check out Liverpool, they’re so good

So that’s it! There was a lot to get through in this post; if you’ve made this far, I salute you… I hope people find these guidelines useful, and if you have any questions leave me a comment below.

I’ll leave you with a recommendation to look at Uni of Liverpool Library’s Instagram account - however good our numbers are I know theirs will be astronomically better! They’re really good at this stuff, and you’ll find them @livunilibrary.

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Interested in Instagram training for your library or cultural org? Details of my social media workshops here.

Book Takeaway and User-Focused Delivery

Having not presented at a conference for two and a half years, I recently presented at two in a week!

In June I wrote about the Rough Edges and Risks talk I did on library social media for a UK event; a couple of days later I presented on my place of work’s user-centred response to the pandemic, for a US event: NEFLIN’s conference. Because of my incredibly unreliable blogging schedule, it’s taken me two additional months to write about this one…

First off here are the slides.

Book Takeout and User-Docused Delivery from Ned Potter

For this presention I was specifically asked to talk about University of York Library and the things we’ve done since March 2020. The slides above detail our Book Takeaway service, social media response, study space bookings and many other things in a timeline.

I’m incredibly proud of York and our response - the trouble with writing or talking about it is it just sounds like platitudes. ‘Incredibly user focussed’ is such a buzz-wordy phrase but that’s what we were and are. I enjoyed the chance to talk about the way in which we managed to deliver some amazing services during the height of the pandemic, whilst still prioritising staff well-being - it CAN be done.

You can see the presentations from all previous conferences on the Past Talks & Workshops page.

Risks and Rough Edges: Building Genuine Relationships Through Library Social Media

Here we are with another regular blog-post, following on from the last one a mere [checks notes] 418 days ago!

I was recently invited by Royal Holloway to present at an event they were organising on academic library social media. RH themselves were also presenting, as were representatives from MMU and Liverpool Uni Libraries. The other presentations were all great (see below) and I learned a lot.

My presentation was about the work we do at University of York Library, and in particular how we’ve seen a monumental spike in social media engagement over the last 18 months or so. The slides are here.

Risks and rough edges: Building Genuine Relationships Through Library Social Media from Ned Potter

The whole thing was recorded on Zoom so if you’d rather you can see and hear the slides here:

The video above starts from my talk, but I’d really recommend checking out the Nathalie Rees’s talk on MMU, Patrick Walker and our host Greg Leurs’s talk on Royal Holloway, and Amy Lewin’s talk on Liverpool University too.

It was great to hear talks from four different libraries with four varying approaches (I felt we at York had the most in common with Liverpool but everyone came at it slightly differently. There were so many conferences and events centering on social media a few years ago but you don’t get so many now - it’s still a really key issue though!

Thanks again to Greg for inviting me to present.

How to post to Instagram from a PC

Posting to Insta is officially mobile-only, and the desktop version doesn’t have the button to add media. But it’s relatively straightforward to trick your desktop into displaying a mobile view, and then you can post from it directly.

There’s a million articles online about using Instagram from a PC or laptop but they’re all ludicrously complicated or involve using third-party apps etc - none of that is necessary, if you follow the steps below. (The screenshots are from Google Chrome but you can do more or less the exact same thing in Firefox.)

1) Go to instagram.com on your PC, and log in

2) Right click anywhere. You’ll see Inspect listed at the bottom of the menu which appears: click that

Log-in to Insta, right-click, and choose Inspect from the menu

3) You’ll see the html on the right of the screen. At the top of that there’s an icon showing a phone and a tablet - if you hover over it you’ll see it’s called Toggle device toolbar. Click this: the rest of the screen will then display the website on a mobile view. At the top of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu which allows you to choose what kind of device you want to simulate, so you can choose an iphone or whatever else you want

Choose a mobile device: Chrome will show Instagram as it would appear on that device

4) Now for the absolutely key bit (thank you to my colleagues Hannah and Antonio for getting me up to speed on this part!): refresh the browser using F5 or the Reload page button. You’ll then see the crucial button, missing until now, that you get on your phone: the + in a square which represents ‘Add picture / video’. Pressing it on your PC will open up the usual file explorer, allowing you to navigate to the media of your choice.

Refreshing the website brings up the Add Media button, highlighted in yellow here

5) Choose a Filter if you like, press Next, add your caption, location, tagged people (and in Advanced Settings you’ll find the option to add Alt Tags too) and click Share to post to Instagram.

Why would you want to use Instagram on your desktop in the first place?

This technique is useful for three main reasons in my experience.

The first and most important thing is, Instagram is such a key social media tool for organisations, but not everyone wants organisational accounts on their personal phone. I work with people who’d rather not mix those two worlds and I completely understand that - but I want them to be able to contribute to our Instagram account without having to compromise their principles! This method means everyone can get involved.

The second reason is, if you already have photography on your hard-drive or network drive, it saves having to get that onto your mobile device’s camera roll.

The third thing is, you can write the post at any time of day and it will stay there waiting for you to post it at the time of your choosing (unless, obviously, you close the window / tab / browser). So if you have 5 minutes to compose the perfect Insta post first thing, but don’t want it to go live till the peak time to post later in the day, you can do the work at 9am and actually post it at 3pm.

Okay that’s it. Happy posting!