Asia-Pacific Library and Information Conference 2018, 30 July - 2 August 2018 Gold Coast: Roar Leap Dare
This presentation (PowerPoint slides) supports the talk on the Invercargill City Libraries and Archives’ approach to social media marketing.
Over the past four years, the Invercargill City Libraries and Archives’ Facebook has seen “viral success” multiple times, with two posts reaching over one million people each. These events were not isolated but instead were the result of many years of ongoing work accomplished on a shoestring budget. We found that while large, “viral” posts help boost our Facebook likes and engagement every few months, it was the reputation we were building online over time that was helping keep our community engaged and growing.
This talk will look into the what, where and why of our social media journey. Covering both our successes and failures, we will also look at the misconceptions faced regarding social media and how to best deal with them. Specifically we will answer:
- Why invest time in social media?
- What initial strategies did we implement? What worked and what didn’t?
- What were our biggest social media successes, and why were they so successful?
- How can these lessons be harnessed by other libraries
- What’s next?
In answering these questions we looked at available metrics provided by Facebook insights to help understand what content was driving our success and engaging our audience the most. We use these data points to help create our social media strategy that we update on a yearly basis. This talk is aimed at providing useful and practical information for Libraries who wish to invest more time in social media.
