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

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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:

Graph shows Higher Ed with a 3% engagement rate, and non-profits with a 1.4% engagement rate, both comparing favourably with most other industries

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!

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Instagram for Libraries

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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.

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Book Takeaway and User-Focused Delivery

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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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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Tweeting for libraries: a handful of useful tools and examples

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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 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

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.

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.