Social Media and the Seattle Public Library
Over the course of several exchanges I was able to conduct an interview with the Seattle Public Library’s Director of Marketing and Online Services, as well as the library’s Virtual & Instruction Services. Contrary to the initial instructions of the project I broke the four questions down into ten direct questions feeling that this would facilitate clearer and more precise answers. The end result was a fairly robust interview detailing the policies and approaches of the Seattle Public Library in social media.
The beginning of the library’s social media department is quite curious as it began as a small endeavor by the central library’s Teen Advisory Group as part of their attempt to reach out to their members. This was in 2008, and as the importance of social media was realized, the operation was turned over to the library’s Communications Office. At this stage the social media outreach consisted primarily of Facebook, with postings occurring typically only once or twice a week. This was far from enough to fully engage with the community, and so a special team was created consisting of regular librarians and members of the marketing department to manage and improve the growing social media outreach.
The library’s approach to social media has varied depending on the platform. For example with Facebook they focus on trying to start conversations between users, often by asking for questions or recommendations and letting the users themselves generate the content from there. With Twitter, on the other hand, the focus is much more on individual conversations and answering questions from users. They meet weekly to brainstorm new ideas and initiatives for the coming week and regularly invite input from the library as a whole. Others in the system can suggest ideas and events via the library’s internal network, which adds them to a calendar which the team then regularly reviews and implements.
The library does have an established policy, but this is largely borrowed from the library’s overall privacy policy which details how the library will conduct itself and how it expects users to conduct themselves. The social media team is looking to review these guidelines and further adapt them to their needs, creating policies customized toward each of the platforms on which it operates.
The team has focused on marketing both on and offline. Internal initiatives to promote library programs and services exist beside paid promotional campaigns to reach out to and gain followers. In addition there are advertisements through local media outlets as well as basic word of mouth campaigns, all of which promote awareness and usage of social media services.
This outreach has led to a fairly standard audience aged 25-44, with more women than men participating. This is, in many ways, the ideal social media demographic though the library does admit that it struggles with reaching out to the non-English speaking community. This is cited as their primary weakness, but the team is working to improve this aspect, specifically planning to expand their operations to better serve Seattle’s Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian and Chinese communities.
The library keeps track of the standard KPIs (key performance indicators) but adds to this specific metrics based on the current focus of the library. For example, measuring card sign-up rates during a social media campaign to encourage people to get library cards. This gives a more direct sense of how effective the program is at directly reaching and influencing its followers, rather than just providing a series of raw numbers whose meaning can be rather ambiguous. The same applies to advertising library events and programs and other aspects of the social media campaign.
In expanding their campaign they look for what social media platforms most effectively reach the communities the library wishes to serve. Looking at the numbers provided by these platforms alongside analytics and research by groups such as PEW and Simply Measured provide guidance in this process, helping them to maximize their outreach. They do admit that establishing a firm ROI measure can be difficult due to the brevity of some platforms and general lack of data, so the focus is more on KPIs than ROI, as KPIs allow more flexibility and allow platforms to viewed in the context of the team’s overall strategy—who to reach, how best to reach them, etc.
The library as a whole is looking to expand the social media endeavor, having seen already its effectiveness in advertising and outreach when combined with the library’s other digital endeavors. The goals are to continue expand membership on various platforms, come up with new and innovative ways to reach out to followers, and shore up their outreach to the non-English and ESL communities. With the rapid growth of the library’s virtual offerings, the importance of social media is on the rise for Seattle.
In summation, the library’s efforts to create and expand its social media endeavors have proven thus far successful. They have a dedicated team constantly looking for new ideas and innovations while involving the wider library community. They pride themselves with the place they’ve earned in Seattle and the trust their followers have in them, and while they admit that their program has struggled to effectively reach the non-English community, they have been looking to rectify this. While social media has not been the most effective tool for some libraries, in the case of Seattle and its growing digital endeavors, it has been a boon indeed. Indeed, their methods and results largely seem to align with those put forward by Katie Paine in The Social Media Measurement Manifesto which puts the emphasis on engagement, outreach, and connecting with users rather than simply passively advertising to them, a factor corroborated by Solomon. In this, Seattle has so far excelled.
Works Cited
Paine, K. (2009). Social Media Measurement Manifesto. KDPaine & Partners, LLC.
Solomon, L. (2013). Foreword. In C. &. Harmon, Using social media in libraries: Best practices. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Solomon, L. (2013). Foreword. In C. &. Harmon, Using social media in libraries: Best practices. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.