ACRL-VWIG & ALA Virtual Communities in Libraries Program

March 19, 2017  CVL Auditorium in Second Life 12:00pm SLT

“Beyond Basic Social Media: Moving Towards Content Marketing”

 presented by:

Laura Solomon,  (Lebachai Vesta in Second Life) 
Ohio Public Library Information Network

 

At this month’s ACRL-CVL Meeting, social media expert Laura Solomon, Library Services Manager at the Ohio Public Library Information Network, shared her experiences and offered tips on how to use digital tools to promote library related content in new ways.  Laura is the author of “The Librarian’s Nitty Gritty Guide to Content Marketing” (2016) and “Doing Social Media So It Matters: A Librarians Guide (2010) both published by the American Library Association.

 

Lebachai Vesta

Content marketing for libraries is more than just letting people know what items your library has.  Users need to know what the pay-off is for them to use those materials or to use the library.  Good content marketing is not just promotional material, it should tell your library story.  

To be effective, content marketing in digital media needs to be:

1)     Strategic - has a plan behind it; at fulfilling some need of your user

2)     Relevant - actually be something useful for your intended audience

3)     Targeted -  designed for a particular audience (and need)

4)     Consistent –has to happen on a regular basis

5)     Goals- content is meant to drive a particular action

Before posting to social media, you should ask these 3 questions to make sure you’re about to post something useful:

-Why does this make the library valuable to the chosen audience?

-Was this designed to meet a targeted audience’s need?

-Where can this content best serve people?

When the content that libraries push out in digital media fail to consider these design aspects of effective content marketing,  what happens is they get a reputation for being useless to users,  users show a lack of interest in libraries and their resources, and, in the end, they come to see libraries as having no perceived value.

Laura discussed 4 basic planning stages libraries should consider when designing useful digital content 

-figure out your target audience

-speak to their needs, and interests and address their “pain points”  NOT their roles

-create a single editorial calendar to help plan & visualize your content marketing

-publish in a way that personalizes content, tell a story about it

Follow the 30-70 rule; make 30% of your content about promotion while 70% is about engaging with your audience.

Finally Laura suggested that you “repurpose” whatever content you create.  Create something once and adapt it for posting in other social media sites.  Turn your blog into an info graphic for Pinterest, add hashtags for Twitter, create a teaser and post to Facebook with links back to your library.