New article for Times Higher on how to get your library / museum / charity etc to become ex-X

I very much think it’s time we got out organisations off Twitter / X, and I’m delighted to say there’s a real movement happening in that direction.

Since I wrote this blogpost about how to get your organisation off X and a shorter LinkledIn version which has had a lot of repostings, absolutely loads of people have got in touch from across librarianship and beyond, to say they’ve put the 5 suggested steps into practice and are getting off the platform.

I particularly loved this reposting from Angela Hursh, author of the Super Library Marketing blog:

“Here’s what happened when I stopped posting to Twitter:

✔ Traffic to my website remained the same.
✔I felt less stressed with one less platform to maintain!
✔I regretted nothing.
”

— Angela Hursh

In order to try and reach an audience beyond my usual networks, I’ve re-written the piece for the Times Higher, and it sits somewhere between the two versions above in length. If you’ve not already read one of the others, have a look and see if you can start the process of becoming ex-X.

Click the pic to view the article on the Times Higher website

If you’re interested you can read my previous piece for the Times Higher on how departments and orgs can get better at using Instagram, here.

I'm running a workshop at UCISA's UX in Education event

I’ve heard a lot of good things about UCISA events but I’ve never been to one before, so I’m delighted to be running a workshop at the UX in Education conference in September.

You can see more about the event, including the excellent lineup of speakers, here.

The workshop is a new version ‘Communicating the benefits of UX to everyone who needs to hear them’, focusing on the entire comms lifecycle of a UX project - from the pitch, to recruiting, to presenting the findings, to cementing the UX legacy… It will be an interactive and expanded take on my OA article of the same name in the UXLibs Yearbook: if you’re coming to the event I look forward to seeing you there!

It's time: how to get your organisation off Twitter / X

In previous posts on becoming ex-X I’ve stopped short of saying *everyone should* leave the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Mainly because people have built up networks which may not be re-creatable elsewhere, and they were there before Musk came along, so why SHOULD they have to move? But recent events have made me question this, especially when it comes to libraries, museums, archives and Higher Education.

I saw this post from Kevin Gannon on BlueSky which sums it up about right:

I have been leery about unilateral declarations on what people should or shouldn't do about Twitter, bc I know there are networks that have been built there which are irreplaceable. But at this point, I just don't see any way one can ethically use that site. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

[image or embed]

— Kevin Gannon (@thetattooedprof.bsky.social) Aug 7, 2024 at 15:15

Musk is actively encouraging division, and helping to incite riots. He’s spreading far-right conspiracy theories. He’s talking about civil-war in the UK. There is simply no other circumstances in which our organisations would be complicit in using, and therefore encouraging use of, a platform whose owner not only espouses such dangerous views but uses the platform itself to amplify them. Our presence on X is an implicit endorsement. We shouldn’t be there.

So how do you get off Twitter? For what it’s worth here’s what I’ve done with my library.

1: Set a date, and tell people

As tempting as it is to leave now, we need to give our users time to hear that we’re leaving, digest this, and make alternative plans to get news from us. In January this year I decided @UoYLibrary would leave Twitter by the end of August, so we had a clean break for the new academic year.

The long lead-in time has been helpful. I wrote a briefing paper for senior leadership in February explaining why we were doing this, and shared it with the comms group, which led to some really good suggestions as to how to mitigate the impact, more on which below. We also announced our intention to leave Twitter on Twitter itself in July, so our audience there had time to get used to the idea and follow us on alternative platforms. It says it in our bio as well as our pinned tweet.

We’ve since reposted about this news, and have now done a nice little ‘favourite twitter moments’ round-up thread of some semi-viral tweets and nice interactions we’ve had over the years. These were nice to revisit in and of themselves - we’ve loved being there for 99% of the time - and will also serve to get the word out to more Twitter users before we go.

2. Consider creative ways to mitigate the impact on your Twitter audience

What do we lose by leaving Twitter? You can think about it in terms of both content (we tweet about this, and that) and audiences (those people will be fine because they follow us on Insta, these people won’t because they don’t see messages elsewhere).

Content-wise, we’ve had some lovely creative times with Twitter over the years, but as it’s become more broken and less functional we’re really reduced use of it to basic status updates - building A is closing early today, resource B is now available, service C launches today etc. So we’ve built a library status page (which we’re encouraging people to bookmark) that tells them this info without needing Twitter.

@uoylibrary So is #SatisfyingLibraryUpdates going to catch on? Well here’s one: with info on student curators, 24/7, a new exhbition and our sensory rooms which are opening soon. #unifyork #library #sensoryrooms #libinspo #librariesoftiktok #studytips #UoYTips #satisfying ♬ original sound - Uni of York library

We use Instagram Stories (see the pinned examples on our profile here) to say the sort of things we’d previously have put in Tweets, and occasionally use TikTok for general updates too, so of course we’re encouraging our Twitter audience to follow us there if they use those platforms.

[Sidenote: I’ve invented - actually I’m sure I didn’t really invent it and lots of people to do this - a way to get news updates via the video medium called ‘satisfying updates’ where I use the duet function on TikTok to give the students something satisfying to look at whilst sticking around long enough to hear key updates from me…]

Then we come to audience - in very simple terms almost all of our undergraduates are on Insta and TikTok between them so we know they’re well covered. PGTs are increasingly on Instagram too, and more and more Researchers are heading there. Academics are, for us, the problem audience that we can’t reach easily without Twitter - they’re not all going to the same place when they leave Twitter, and while BlueSky shows promise it isn’t there yet in terms of a critical mass of York academics using it. So we’ve spoken to the central University comms team and asked if they’d be willing to tweet perhaps three or four really important things about the library each year (things like 24/7 opening for exams) which they’re happy to do, and we’ll make sure our more internal marketing routes, such as the ones offered by the Faculty Librarian Team I co-manage, step up too.

Obviously your audiences may be completely different to ours if you’re not an academic library - so use all the data you have to try and work out which demographic is most reliant on Twitter for info about your org, and see if there’s any other way to reach them. Don’t rule out non-social media options too - one of the things we’re going to do is put more posters up in the colleges where all the PGRs are!

3. Make sure you turn off Grok data sharing

Twitter recently activated an on-by-default, unannounced, data-sharing setting where everything you’ve ever tweeted can be used to ‘train’ Grok, Twitter’s stupid LLM AI bot thing. You don’t want that. No one wants that. Get it in the bin.

If anyone's wondering how things are going on the hellsite: This setting was just turned on by default for everyone. if you still have an account with content, go log in and disable this so Grok can't use your tweets as training data. Direct link: twitter.com/settings/gro...

[image or embed]

— Corey (@coreyjrowe.bsky.social) Jul 26, 2024 at 03:17

Here’s the direct link to the Settings to turn data sharing off - it works on desktop but not, I hear, on mobiles.

4. keep the account

I’ve wrestled with this a bit - any social media account that is out there in the world is, in effect, a front window for your organisation. So keeping an account alive even when it’s not active is problematic - people may still send DMs which will go unanswered; people could find old tweets and reply to them and we wouldn’t see it, etc. However, I don’t want to lose the account name and let someone else take it and potentially impersonate the library, and there is of course a tiny, tiny possibility that Twitter may one day be habitable again, so I’ve decided it’s better to keep the account.

A final decision I need to make on this whether to lock it when we leave. At the moment I’m leaning towards locking, to reduce the chances of new people seeing the account, missing all the ways we’ll try and flag that it’s not active, and then trying to get help or guidance we can’t give by asking questions on the platform. Which brings us to…

5. Make it really, really obvious the account is no longer active

Subtlety is not your friend here. I’ve seen professional accounts who’ve left without changing their bio - we really need to make it unquestionably obvious we’ve left.

Here’s what I did with my own account when I left Twitter:

So that checklist of ways I’ve tried to flag I’m not there, in full:

• Says it in my name

• Says it in my bio

• Says it in the banner pic

• Says it in the pinned tweet

I must confess I don’t know if this has worked or not, because I’ve not logged back in since I left. I tried recently, to disable to the Grok AI LLM thing mentioned above, but it requires 2FA I can’t get without logging in, so I’m stuck… I don’t know, therefore, if there are loads of DMs or people @ing me and thinking I’m rude for not replying - I hope there aren’t, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid that. I’ll be doing the same with @UoYLibrary in a couple of weeks.

finally: How much do we explain why we’re leaving?

A decision I’ve not yet made is, do we write a library news post where we fully go into the details of why we’re leaving? I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this, if you fancy leaving a comment below.

Obviously the pro is, we’re a library, we’re taking an ethical stance, and we want our users to know about it. We want them to get the reasons why. I was speaking to a librarian at another organsiation whilst doing some social media training recently, and she said as a parent she’d be really proud of her kid’s University doing this.

The con is, quite honestly, opening up the possibility of a prolonged debate with some Musk fans, and using up comms bandwidth we REALLY need for other things on the sort of conversations where everyone gets angry but no one changes their mind. (Classic Twitter-these-days conversations, in fact.) It’s also hard to talk about why you’re leaving without sound judgemental towards the people choosing to stay, and we have no wish to be judgemental. So as of right now, I don’t know if there’ll be a big rationale-reveal type post, or we’ll just leave it at ‘Twitter is no longer working for us’.

---

Since we announced we’re leaving Twitter we’ve not had any negative feedback about it. We left Facebook a couple of years back - with not a single complaint from anyone - and it is genuinely freeing to be on one less platform. As pretentious it sounds, social media benefits from your creative energy needing to be split fewer ways, in my experience. I was confident becoming ex-X was the right thing to do for our library when I first decided it at the start of year, and I’m still confident now - what’s more we’ve done some really useful things to lessen the negative impact on our users.

I’d recommend taking the steps above, and doing the same. If anyone is interested in the rationale briefing paper I wrote for our Leadership Team send me an email and I’ll share it with you; here’s how it ends.

By stopping our use of X from September, we will be upholding our values, adapting to the changing landscape of social media by jettisoning a platform no longer delivering value, and freeing up capacity to work on more impactful communications. 

Communicating the benefits of UX to everyone who needs to hear it

At the 2023 User Experience in Libraries conference I ran a workshop all about comms and UX - basically my two favourite aspects of librarianship, mashed together, at my favourite event in librarianship. It was also in Brighton were my wife and I got married, and she came down to hang out with old friends while I was there and attended the conference dinner, and the weather was great - the whole thing was A+++, would do again.

Anyway, the workshop went really well and I later wrote it up for the 2024 UXLibs yearbook, which I’d highly recommend getting your library to buy a copy of. My chapter is now available Open Access via York’s repository so please do go and have a read if this is an area that interests you. I’ve put the intro below so you can see what it’s about.

(You can also find OA chapters from previous UXLibs Yearbooks on my Publications Page.)

---

The introduction TO my UXLibs YEARBOOK chapter

At the end of what was known at the University of York as the ‘UX Study Space Project’, we presented our final recommendations to management. Ten months of work had gone into it and we were proposing (or in some cases had already implemented) far-reaching and wide-spread changes: new study space booking rules; new zoning for food and noise; new signage throughout the library; increasing the number of accessible spaces; creating a new ‘Zoom Room’; purchasing some interactive mapping software… We got some really useful input from the leadership team and they signed off on all the things we wanted to do – at which point it occurred to me: this was the single most impactful piece of work I’d ever done in librarianship.

Nothing else really came close – the fingerprints of our UX project were all over the actual, day-to-day user experience of our students and staff, simplifying and improving things in so many ways: it felt euphoric! But the 10 months of hard work that had made these changes possible could have been undone if we hadn’t been able to effectively and meaningfully show the value of our proposals to the audience who could give them the green light.

UX is such a complex and messy business, and it can be easy to get lost in the processes of ethnography and design. We mustn’t undervalue the comms; successful communication plays a huge part in helping our work achieve its goals, and it’s worth breaking down the communications life cycle of a UX project to ensure we’re making the most of each stage.

Part 1 is The Pitch. This is where you communicate the value of your proposed project, to get the time and resources you require to do the work. The audience here is the managers who can release funds for incentives and release staff time for fieldwork and design, and your colleagues whose input you’d like on the project. 

 Part 2 is The Recruitment. Now the audience are library users (and, ideally, non-users too) that you need to persuade to participate in the fieldwork, lending you their insight. 

 Part 3 is The Findings. This is where you need to communicate the results in such a way that you’re empowered to really act on them – it’s not UX if all you do is diagnose problems… The audience here is not just the managers who need to approve your design proposals, but wider library staff too. Keep them in the loop and get them on board. 

 Part 4 is The Legacy. Here the audience is everyone. Everyone needs to know what you’ve done, how brilliant it was, and what the ongoing impact is. Tell the participants. Then tell the world. 

All in all, UX is a comms-heavy business, so let’s explore each stage in more detail and look at some tips to enrich your UX and help make those user-centred changes your library needs. 

[Read on here]

Library marketers! Don't fall into the trap of thinking TikTok is just a young person's platform...

There’s some really interesting data I’d like to present in this post for your perusal, so I’m going to put it at the top as a sort of tl;dr version - but obviously please do carry on reading for the context of why it matters!

So here it is. Broadly speaking, we think of Facebook as being for older people, Insta and TikTok as being for younger people, and Twitter* for being somewhere in the middle - the sweet spot for that 25-34 demographic. However:

Twitter has around 127 million users aged 25-34, where as TikTok has 256 million users aged 25-34. In other words there are more than twice as many 25-34 year olds on TikTok (the young person’s platform) than there are on Twitter (the 25-34 year old’s platform!).

Remarkable, eh? But why does this matter? Recently I was working with a library on their marketing, and asked them if they'd considered using TikTok. No, came the reply: our average user is 28 years old, an age more associated with Twitter demographics.

First of all, kudos to the institution for a) knowing useful demographic data and b) using it to inform their decision-making! We all need to do more of that.

However there's a risk that we can let the dominant narratives about social networks disguise important insights: in this case, the idea that TikTok is full of young people (which it is) obscured the fact that there are SO MANY people on the platform overall that it's useful library marketing for all age-ranges.

These days accurate Twitter user-figures are hard to find, but here's what I discovered via Statista. There are around 335 million users of the platform, a massive 38% of whom are in the 25-34 age bracket. So: 127 million people in the age range for the target 28 year old. And no other social network that I looked into had such a high percentage in this particular group: so far, so good for Twitter.

However! Whilst only 16% of TikTok users are in the same 25-34 age-range, that's 16% of 1.6 billion users - this amounts to 256 million people in total. In other words *twice as many 28 year olds are on TikTok than are on Twitter.*

Only 8% of TikTok users are aged 35-44 like me (I am clinging on to that age-range for another few months before I get promoted to the 45+ one!) but in my own experience if feels chock-full of them... I drum for a band that exclusively plays 90s Dance music - trust me when I say, people aged 35-50 love it but it's of very little interest to anyone younger! And yet we do very well on TikTok (more so than Insta or Twitter or Facebook) because it turns out, there are a lot of nostalgic people in their 40s on there, who want to see a band play the song Renegade Master live on stage (42,000 views and counting) 😄

Anyway. The point is that TikTok is an option worth considering (in the long term its battles with the US Government may, or may not, change that) even if you don't consider your library's key demographic to be especially youthful. It's always worth looking deeper at the numbers behind the narratives, and how they relate to YOUR library community.

----

*I'm just not going to say X. I'm not going to say X, formerly Twitter. It's too annoying. I'm just going to say Twitter, forever.