Steal These Tweets

We’ve been hearing the social media message for some time now – it’s important, we should have a strategy, we should all be engaged in it, we need to be measuring our efforts. We are told just about everything except for one very important thing: What exactly should we be posting on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter?  I recently contributed an article to NoveList called “What We Tweet About When We Tweet About Books” that addressed just this.

In it you can catch a glimpse of exactly what one library tweets about and why.  There’s some talk of strategy and measurement, but mostly it is real, successful Twitter content that will hopefully offer some fresh ideas if you are struggling to come up with 140 interesting and engaging characters.  Go ahead, steal them – or borrow them as we librarians prefer to say. 

Of course, libraries should tweet about more than books. In future posts, I’ll share some creative ways to push content about library programs, community events, and more. I’ll share more ideas for creating content on Facebook as well. And yes, I’ll talk about social media strategy and policy and measurement, too.

I’ll also talk about promoting databases using both traditional and new media, which is not an easy marketing effort to undertake.  I’ll go ahead and tell you one thing right now about promoting databases – it helps if the database provider makes it easy for staff to get comfortable using the product. Librarians are much more inclined to hand-sell databases if they themselves understand how to use them.

NoveList’s RA News and their other monthly newsletters do just this.  If your library subscribes to NoveList, you should consider subscribing to one of their newsletters.   And here’s the really great thing – even if your library doesn’t subscribe to NoveList, you can still subscribe to these newsletters and get ideas that go beyond using their specific products.  They offer general RA tips, tools, and ideas that you can steal to better serve readers of all ages.