One Big Social Media Prediction for 2017

Here’s my one big social media prediction for libraries in 2017. Are you ready?

It’s this: Your social media won’t improve … if you don’t try to make it better.

If you are guilty of any of these things:

• Saying “yes, we’re on Instagram/Snapchat/The Next New Thing” [now I can check it off my list].
• You don’t “get” Twitter/Snapchat/Facebook/etc … and don’t make an attempt to figure it out.
• You read bunches of books and blog posts, but don’t make any changes.
• You over edit/over analyze to the point of not really posting much.
• You don’t post much on your social media channels, then say “yeah, our patrons don’t really want to friend a library.”
• Don’t have any goals for this year.
• etc.

If you are guilty of the things above, then your social media channels probably won’t improve.

Thankfully, this is a really easy fix. Sit down with your team, department, boss, library director, favorite colleague – and do 30 minutes of planning. Look at your analytics (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Youtube all have useful analytics) and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Then, create some goals. They might even be simple ones, like growing your customer base or posting consistently. It might be slightly more ambitious, like setting a goal of more engagement for each post. Or maybe connecting what you do in social media with a library-wide goal.

But easy or more difficult, you will have goals. And you can easily work to meet those goals. And my prediction will be wrong.

Please – make my 2017 prediction NOT come true! Instead, set some goals, figure out how to measure them. And then do the hard work of making your library better – one social media post at a time.

Image by Claudia Dia, messed with by me.