Speaker: Jeff Wisniewski
Why be social
bad reasons – it’s cool, my boss told me to, etc
better reasons – provides innovative ways for libraries to connect with ysers we may never see face to face, to encourage, promote, innovate, learn, adapt, to improve customer service, to discover and deliver what users want, to market without marketing
Listen first
is it a conversation? What’s being said?
Listen first to see what the tone is
Developing a social media plan
define a strategy
define goals – ie., increase awareness of library services, increase the number of new cards issues, etc
pick a platform or two
the right platform depends on your goals
Then – start!
start blogging/leaving comments, etc
Assessing social media success
quantitatively and qualitatively – both are needed
what you are measuring – the “trinity approach” – behavior, outcome, experience
the what (behavior)
quantitative
number of blog posts
- Boyd’s Conversation Index: posts/comments + trackbacks, should be greater than 1
number of facebook friends/fans
views/visits
Outcome: the tangible benefit of your social media activity
- higher satisfaction
- fewer help desk calls
- more searches
- increase in funding
Example – are your flickr imsages viewed? Monitor the number of users. Also monitor referrals from flickr to your website, then you can say collection use has increased by 2.1%… coolness.
Experience
put on your listening ears!
listen/engage/converse – take action
be authentic – admit problems and engage that way
Experience metric – experience CAN be measured and evaluated
stars, scars, or neutral? (positive, negative, neutral comments)
5 things to get started:
1. monitor general search engine results
- focus on google (they do the best in including social media stuff in search results)
2. monitor social media search engine results
- why?
- used by high-value, highly connected, highly influencial users
- pays great divedends if they are fans of the library
choose the specific social media search engines that match your media efforts
- delicious – see how many people bookmarked it (quant) and something else…
- twitter – do you show up? How often?
- advanced search has a local search option
3. create alerts
- check standard web logs for refers from search engines. What terms do people use?
- use quotes
- choose “comprehensive” to get results from news, globs, web, video, and groups
4. analytics
- create a conversion funnel to measure a social media action chain. It measures follow-through. IE if they go to a signup page, did they finish the process? If they did, that’s a conversion.
5. assess the nature and sentiment of activity
- what’s the stregth and tone of the social media activity?
- is it deep, is it a drive by, one-off comment?
Tagged as:
analytics,
il2008,
measurement,
social media,
statistics
Share posts on Facebook to Gain More Readers
by David Lee King on March 6, 2012
Want to get more people reading your library blog posts? Here’s one handy way to do it – share that post on your library’s Facebook Page. Here’s what happened when I did that with one of my library’s blog posts.
So … I have a blog on my library’s website that I started in January. It’s the Digital Branch blog (I figured I’m the Branch manager, so I should have a branch manager blog. I write about web geekish stuff related to the library’s digital branch that our customers might find interesting).
One of those blogposts has gathered more pageviews that all the other digital branch blogposts combined – a post about Pinterest. So far, Google Analytics shows 137 pageviews for that post. Not too bad! I wanted more comments (because we’re working on a pilot project for a Pinterest account), so I decided to share the post on our library’s Facebook Page.
On our Facebook Page, use Facebook Insights to drill down to an individual post (really cool that you can narrow down that far!). Here are the stats for that particular Facebook post:
So of my blog post’s 137 pageviews, 68 of them, or 50%, came directly from sharing that post on our Facebook Page (Google Analytics further backs that up by showing an “Entrance” number of 70 views on that post, meaning that 70 people came directly to that post from someplace other than my library’s website – i.e., from Facebook to the blogpost).
Simple stuff – write a blogpost, then share it out using Twitter and Facebook. Ask people to comment, and they will (I received comments on the blogpost, on the Facebook post, and in Twitter). And you just might get more readers in the process.
Pic by Britta Bohlinger
Tagged as: analytics, blog posts, blogs, comments, insights, page views, pinterest, readers, statistics, stats
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