Public Library Social Media in a Post-Twitter World

Last month I went to Kilkenny to present at the Library Association of Ireland’s Public Libraries Conference. The short version of this post is, it was a fantastic conference; libraries in Ireland get a lot more support from their government than British ones and it SHOWS in their confidence and morale and general fabulousness; and I uploaded my presentation to Slideshare if you’d like to see it:

Public library social media in a post-Twitter world from Ned Potter

I was running some training online for Irish public libraries earlier in the year, and I said jokingly (or, half-jokingly…) ‘as great as this is, if anyone would like to invite me back to Ireland I’d love to come!’ and Mary Murphy from the LAI took me at my word! I’m so glad she did because the whole thing was a great experience.

It reminded me of when I ran workshops in Australia - when a nation truly values its libraries, the whole conversation around them is just different. It starts from a place of positivity, and moves forward from there into creativity and inclusivity - the capacity for those things is greater because the librarians aren’t having to be on the defensive and trying to justify their existence. Someone said to me on the coffee break ‘whichever party is in Government, we always get support’ - can you imagine that being said at a British conference? It was lovely to visit such a place and a get a sort of library-serotonin boost…

The other great this about this whole trip was that my wife Alice could come with me, and in fact - for the first time ever - she saw me talk at an event. It was odd to mix these two worlds, and I had to consciously not think about her presence while I was presenting so I didn’t get in my own head. Whenever I do conference talks I always ask the audience to speak to each other about a key part of the topic, around ten minutes in - it turns everyone in the room into active participants and raises the energy levels all round; I love it and whole-heartedly recommend it to presenters. I didn’t warn Alice about it though, so she found herself talking to the librarian in the seat next to her about things she had no context for or interest in - lovely stuff…

On the way home we diverted into the Wicklow Mountains and it was beautiful.

Thanks to Mary and everyone at the LAI who invited me, and to all the conference deletagates I chatted to and who asked great questions during my talk. I loved the whole thing - I hope someone will have me back over in 2025!

The Researcher's Guide to Bluesky

If you’re reading this you probably know the emerging social network Bluesky has had an explosion of popularity. I wanted to set up a profile for my library, but I needed it to be worth it - we needed a critical mass of University of York people there to rebuild our former Twitter network.

With that in mind I decided to adapt a Bluesky guide I’d written on here, to make it a guide for Researchers - the idea being to make it as easy as possible for people to make the switch. In other words, I’ve tried to help catalyse the change I needed in order to justify putting time into Bluesky, and I think overall this approach actually worked!

Because the guide was aimed at academics in particular, I sought input from academics at York who were already on the platform. Would you like to be in a York Starter Pack I asked them, and do you have any tips for your peers? They were all terrifically enthusiastic about the idea for the guide, and gave lots of useful quotes - the researcher perspective was essential, so I’m grateful to them all. I also got permission from the Central Comms Team at the University to do this in the first place, sharing a draft with them and adding some pointers around policy which they wanted included.

1: The Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky.

It’s published on my library’s blog rather than on here because I wanted it to be seen as an ‘official’ output of the Library & Archives. I promoted it via staff newsletters, asking the Central Comms Team to add it to their Bluesky guidance, and of course going back to each and every York academic I’d spoken to about the platform to share a link with them.

I also used it to launch the library’s Bluesky account. I thought this would be good - you can’t beat being USEFUL to hit the ground running on a new social media platform - but considering we had no followers and Bluesky doesn’t have a centralised algorithm to push content towards people, I’m fairly stunned about how much engagement we got. At the time of writing it is exactly three weeks since we posted a link to the guide (as part of a larger thread outlining its key points) and we’ve had over 600 reposts and 750+ Likes - plus so, so many replies, pins, and messages of thanks.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

The great thing about the guide doing so well is it exposed us to new followers (including York people who may not otherwise found us), established some credibility for us as an account worth listening to, and literally brought more researchers to the platform which was of course the main driver for writing it in the first place. We now have around five-and-a-half thousand followers after 21 days - on Twitter we had around 7,500 (before Musk took over and everyone left) but that took us 12 years, and engagement was way lower than it is on Bluesky.

As successful as the guide was, the fact is the York blog on which it was posted isn’t well known enough for people to just randomly stumble across it - you need to be sent there via a link in an email or a Bluesky post, realistically. I wanted to reach more researchers through an existing authority with an established network, to get more eyes on the guide - so I pitched a version to the LSE Impact Blog for Social Sciences. You’re probably familiar with this but if you’re not, the key thing to know is it has completely out-stripped the original purpose that gave it its name! The blog has become a sort of academic hub for ideas and practical guides for people across all disciplines in Higher Education.

2: How to get started on Academic bluesky

>> Here, then, is How To Get Started With Academic Bluesky.

The above is a shorter version of the first guide, due to the Impact Blog’s word-count limit - it has the York-policy-specific parts omitted, and is generally leaner. It also benefits from some helpful suggestions given to me by Michael Taser, the Managing Editor (the final paragraph in particular) and in general I prefer this edition of the guide.

This version has also had a great reception and achieved the aim of reaching more people, hopefully bringing more researchers to the platform (which will in turn make it more useful for the York academics, meaning more of THEM will come to the platform, meaning the time WE are putting into it becomes more worthwhile, and so on and so on). Certainly the greater reach of the Impact blog has helped a lot - it’s had probably around 150% of the views of the original guide.

As more and more libraries started to appear on the Bluesky as part of its November popularity surge, it was inevitable that I’d end up writing yet another iteration…

3: The Library Guide to Bluesky

>> Here, then, is the Library Guide to Bluesky.

The edition is published here on this blog because it’s written ‘as me’, rather than as the library itself. This is a culmination of what I’ve learned and applied from writing the other guides, with some advice on actual content thrown in there as well.

Again I’d like to reach a wider audience than I can get to on this blog alone, so I’ve pitched a version to Library Journal and we’ll see what they say. Speaking of pitches…

4: a bluesky guide for academic departments and professional services

>> Here, then, is the University Guide to Bluesky.

I pitched a guide to the Times Higher (for whom I’ve written a couple of pieces previously), again on the grounds that reach will be higher there than here, with my target audience. This version is organisational rather than individual, and very much HE in nature - although much of it could apply across the cultural sector.

And that will be that - no more Bluesky guides from me (almost certainly!) and all bases covered. Taking experiences and chunking them up into (hopefully useful) guidance for others has always been one of my favourite things, so I’ve actually really enjoyed this whole Bluesky business… One reply I got to a Bluesky post sums up why it’s worth the time to write these:

“So appreciated!!! From little tips to engagement and the starter packs. You have no idea how helpful this is when you’re doing this in addition to the ‘day job’ but also trying to inform/advocate for your colleagues/researchers that you support in a newish area of social media! Bravo!!”

— A Researcher Engagement Team

The Library Guide to Bluesky

During November 2024, the social network Bluesky underwent a significant transformation. What had been a platform where a few libraries set up experimental profiles with mixed results, suddenly became a space where many libraries were achieving substantial engagement.

In short, Bluesky has reached a critical mass, with enough users leaving Twitter and joining the platform for it be considered a legitimate X-replacement. This shift makes it worth considering setting up an account for your institution. At one point Bluesky saw a million new users joining daily: for libraries—and cultural organisations in general—this presents a unique opportunity to rebuild communities that have become harder to reach elsewhere.

There are plenty of examples of libraries finding success on Bluesky to draw inspiration from. I went from considering Bluesky to be brilliant for librarians but perhaps not yet suitable for libraries themselves, to seeing an explosion of library success that changed my mind. My own library has been on Bluesky for just over two weeks, and we've seen engagement levels far exceed what we experienced on Twitter over the past two years, as shown below.

If you’ve not seen Bluesky before, the first thing you’ll notice is how similar it is to Twitter in look and feel

And it’s not just us: others have posted comparisons showing engagement is much higher - and more positive - on Bluesky, and newspapers are finding click-throughs to their articles are way higher than on Twitter or Threads also, because links are not suppressed on the newer platform (see info on the lack of algorithm, below).

We’ve built a following quickly too, and while it’s not (yet) quite as big as our ex-X community was, it only took us 9 days to reach the total number of followers we had on Twitter after 9 years! Here’s how the first week went:

Our following numbers were helped by a very popular post (shown in the previous screenshot): a researcher’s guide to Bluesky. Being entertaining is good but being USEFUL is what leads to a larger following

So if you’re a cultural organisation and you’re either new to Bluesky, or considering setting up a profile, what do you need to know? Here’s a library guide to Bluesky: 13 tips to help you hit the ground running.

The big picture stuff

1. Learn from the organisations already active on Bluesky

You may be familiar with ‘Starter Packs’ on Bluesky - this is simply a curated collection of accounts, which you can follow all in one go. Use these to get a good idea of how comparable institutions are using the platform, and steal some of their ideas! I’d recommend pressing the ‘follow all’ button then unfollowing selectively as you go.

I’ve tried to think about what would be most useful for a nascent Bluesky library account, and settled on sector-by-sector Packs as the way forward so you can see what your immediate peers are up to, what sort of content works and gets engagement, and who is already having success. If you fall into the categories below and are not on these lists, tell me on Bluesky and I’ll add you!

Here they are:

• The Academic Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Of all the sectors in libraries, the academic sector appears to be having the most success on Bluesky so far. This is not because of the nature of the content they’re posting, I don’t think - there’s just a lot of the academic community moving to the platform already.

  If you work in an academic library, my uncomplicated recommendation is to get off Twitter, and get on to Bluesky.

  Hopefully this starter pack will provide some inspiration from the libraries already making it work. (Please note there are also three other packs particularly relevant to this sector, none of which I created: the Open Research pack, and the University Presses pack, and the Archives and Special Collections pack.)

• The Public Libraries Bluesky starter pack. This sector is starting to make its way on to the platform, although at the moment there’s a few libraries grabbing the username but not actively posting. In UK terms the two social media behemouths in public libraries are of course the British Library who have not been on Bluesky too long but have already amassed 20k followers, and Orkney who have only been here for 4 days but already past 5k! I love both those libraries and their social media output, but would caution against using them for too much inspiration as their huge followings and cultural cache slightly set them apart from an especially copyable model… I’d recommend checking out Hull Libraries as an example of a newish public library account making the platform work well. (I also see some public libraries having success with Threads, and would recommend choosing one platform or the other rather than spreading your time too thin across both.)

• The Health Libraries Bluesky starter pack. Medical and health libraries are starting to arrive now, and I’ll keep adding them to this pack as they do - it will be interesting to see whether Bluesky or Instagram are the best use of the social media time available.

I’m yet to see enough School Libraries, Law Libraries or other Special Libraries to create Packs for those sectors - that will hopefully change over time. You’ll find recommendations for librarian (rather than library) starter packs in this separate guide.

2. Set up your profile fully before engaging

Every Bluesky guide I’ve read (or written!) says this but I still see loads of accounts falling into the trap of following people before doing their profile. I get it, you’re excited to connect… But trust me you’re missing opportunities: accounts with generic avatars and no biography or introductory text are often perceived as likely to be bots, so users often don’t follow back and sometimes auto-block. Please sort your profile, and write an introductory post, before going on that following spree. It’s well worth it.

3. Get yourself into relevant Starter Packs

Getting into Starter Packs is a great way to accelerate follower growth, especially early on. It may happen on its own, but it’s best to be proactive - just ask the owners of packs to add you! That’s not some sort of breach of etiquette; speaking for myself I want to hear from you and make the packs more useful.

A very popular pack which is great to be on if possible is The MERL’s Arts & Culture pack which gets huge engagement; look locally for Packs created by parent organisations or local groups too. You can search for packs to follow and potentially to join, in the Bluesky Directory.

4. Create Starter Packs of your own that will help your community

One of the best things to ensure enough of your community is on Bluesky to make it worth your while to set up a profile, is to help that audience move from Twitter. I’ve done this in a couple of ways for my library - one is to write the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky, which proved to be a very popular early post with over 500 reposts so far, and which I’ve got into all the relevant staff newsletters etc. The other way to create a University of York Starter Pack, so people from the institution can instantly find and connect with each other.

I’d highly recommend you do one or both of these things early on - create a Starter Pack if the need for one exists, which is helpful for your community; and if applicable write a guide for that community (e.g. ‘the healthcare professionals guide to Bluesky’ or whatever is relevant).

5. Know your target audience, and create content for them (not for other librarians!)

This is essential social media advice regardless of platform. We need to know why we are there, and who we are there for. In my case, I consider Instagram and TikTok to be fabulous ways to reach University of York Students, so I’m crafting the stuff we put on Bluesky specifically for academics and researchers. Other people may enjoy it too which is great, but I’m using the account with a specific target audience in mind - and if I find I’m getting engagement from other libraries or info pros, and NOT from the target audience, I will tweak the content I’m putting out!

6. There’s no centralised algorithm so be proactive. Follow, reply, repost and engage

Bluesky is very Twitter-like in lots of functional ways: you can post up to 300 characters at a time, you can repost, you can Like, and so on. The crucial difference is the lack of algorithm on Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed. There’s no endlessly auto-refreshing content, just posts from the people you follow, in reverse chronological order. That’s it. So you need to follow a bunch of people to make your feed useful, and then start getting involved: join in conversations, ask questions, repost useful things, hit the Like button. In essence - this sounds pretentious I know - the aim is to cultivate community rather than just broadcast your library news.

The details

7. Make it accessible

Finally, a platform that offers alt-text for video as well as images! Thank you Bluesky. I’d recommend accessing Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked Require alt-text before posting and you can create accessible content every time. Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions.

8. Don’t be afraid to block and otherwise moderate your experience

One of the reasons for the notable lack of toxicity on Bluesky compared with Twitter is the moderation options are extensive and they actually work. Blocking is very powerful, muting words is effective, you can detach your own post from a Repost you’re not comfortable with, and so on. Make the most of all this baked-in protection.

9. for most libraries it’s probably worth having your Direct Messages open to all

The point above about moderation notwithstanding, ideally users should be able ask you questions via a DM even if you don’t follow them. The toggle-switch you require to enable this is not in Settings, but rather in the Chat area itself.

10. The question you need to ask yourself as a social media admin is not: what should I post about my org? It’s: what is my community interested in?

Often the best way to build community online is to post a mixture of things about your organisation, and things relevant to or adjacent to your organisation. For example, this post was popular among our target audience because it was about York - there was no informational or promotional message involved, and that’s fine.

We’re back! Today in #York aesthetics news, today’s vibe is rainsoaked but sunny.

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 10:29 AM

11. Don’t be afraid to explore ideas in a bit more detail

Brevity is great but it’s not the be-all and end-all - threads work well here. As well as posting a link to our Researcher’s Guide we also explored the contents in a thread and that really helped increase engagement.

We've written a Researcher's Guide to Bluesky! It's a bit like all those other useful guides to Bluesky, but with several useful insights from University of York academics about using the platform, and we'd love it if it was reposted far and wide... >> blogs.york.ac.uk/library/2024... 🧵 below

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— University of York Library (@uoylibrary.bsky.social) November 13, 2024 at 12:17 PM

12. Posting first thing is probably best avoided

You often get organisations posting 8:30 - 9:30 in the morning because it’s the only time the person doing the social media has any time (and as yet Bluesky lacks an in-built scheduling tool) but in my experience so far, it’s best to wait until later in the day as more people seem to be around. At least give it until mid-morning to post anything important, if you can.

13. Images are important, despite this being a (rare) text-based platform

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not essential like they are on Insta - but if you can add context or character to a post using a picture or video, do so. Engagement will likely be higher.

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I hope the above is helpful, and I also hope it doesn’t make anyone feel pressured to get onto Bluesky if they’re not ready! It seems to be staying the course as a platform and growing all the time, so if you need a few months to get permission and management buy-in and ideas together and all that stuff, it will still be here waiting for you when you’re properly ready. (And of course, if you want a bespoke workshop on it, get in touch with me…)

There are various versions of this guide aimed at different audiences. If you’re looking at Bluesky more as an individual, this blogpost on ten top tips for joining may be helpful.

I’ve already mentioned the Researcher’s Guide To Bluesky above - a leaner, more efficient and less Yorky version of this appears on the LSE Impact Blog here and lots of people have said the tips apply to more than just researchers and academics.

I may yet produce a Uni Department’s Guide to Bluesky just to complete the set, but for now do leave a comment or get in touch if you have any further advice to add, or any questions.

And finally, whilst I have some caveats when recommending Bluesky to libraries (especially if you’re not an academic library) I really have no hesitation in recommending it to librarians and anyone who works in libraries. It’s proving in some ways to be better than Twitter ever was, and I really value the community there. If you haven’t already, join us!

The Spotify-Wrapped Library Marketing Hack

If your library is hot on protecting user-data and privacy, there’s a great opportunity coming up to tie in some marketing with Spotify Wrapped. I’m sure you’re familiar - Spotify extensively mines your usage date over the last year and gives you a nicely packaged graphic summary of it - which many, many people tend to share their version of on social media.

In marketing terms, it's often easier (and more productive) to join in an existing conversation than to start a new one, so the idea is simply to produce a Library Wrapped which cannot give any useful info on what patrons read and did, because WE take user data and privacy seriously. We get the social currency of the Spotify wrapped discourse, and also get to make a useful (and, I think, not widely known) point about libraries being a real outlier these days in actually protecting, rather than exploiting and shilling, user data.

I made a mock-up of the sort of thing I mean, based on the visual style of a previous Spotify year. (And it goes without saying, this is an example with fictional categories to illustrate the idea - obviously you need to be on rock-solid ground with any claims you make about user-privacy at your actual library, so only say things you know are true!)

A mock-up of what a Library Wrapped might look like

I searched for library wrapped examples to see if anyone was already doing this - quite a lot are doing it with total visitor stats etc rather than the privacy angle, like this example from Pembroke, and I think that works too.

I did find one library who has already done my suggestion above, and frankly much better than my mockup! Albany Public Library posted this back in 2021:

Anyway: providing, as mentioned above, you’re completely confident in your claims, make the most of this opportunity to get some advocacy and marketing out into the world!

The Pros and Cons of Hybrid Freelancing

Is there a word for people who are both employed and self-employed? There's a group of us who work the majority of our time in a normal job and also do freelance work in the remaining time: I'm going to call us Hybrid Freelancers, for want of a better term. I love being a hybrid freelancer, and a new change has got me reflecting on the pros and cons.

Today I start a new regime of compressed hours: I'm now doing my 90% FTE hours over 4 days rather than 4.5. I reduced my hours to 90% 12 years ago when I first started doing freelance training & workshops as well as my regular day-job at the University of York, and it has worked really well - taking either a day each fortnight, or half a day each week since Covid hit and things moved online, to prepare and run training sessions.

I literally never run the same session the same way twice. I will always, always revise my materials in some way before each session, either to tailor them to the sector or the organisation, or update them with new information, or just tweak them based on something which went well or less well the previous time I ran it. Up until now, I’ve tended to do that at the end of my regular working day, and the morning of the workshops – 45 minutes here, an hour there, and the materials are updated and ready to go.

Just under a year ago I changed roles at York and became a Faculty Engagement Manager, and I’ve found the new position to be much more intense and to take up a lot more emotional energy than my old one. I’ve noticed I’d get to 5pm or so and simply be too knackered to change gear completely and work on freelance materials, so I’ve found myself working at the weekends or evenings occasionally to prep for workshops - something I absolutely do NOT wish to be doing.

As a result of this, I’ve made the change to compress my hours. 5 days compressed across 4 has always been a mystery to me – the days seem so long I don’t get how people manage it… But to fit less than 4 additional hours into 4 working days, and then have a day off a week, seems very doable. It will mean on a regular workshop day where I run something online from 10am – 1pm, I will have the afternoon completely free to prep the NEXT workshop after that, and so on and so on. I think this will really help.

It also means I can potentially take on more freelance work, although by some miracle I have almost always had the same amount of demand for freelance work as I have time do it in, and I don’t expect demand to double just because my availability has! But hey, if you’re reading this and wondering if I can fit in a larger 2-day workshop or whatever, the answer is, yes, by all means get in touch…

Anyway, one of the cons of being a hybrid freelancer is also one of the pros: dividing your brain in two. On the one hand, the con is that it can be hard to switch gears and fit those two different worlds into a reasonable number of working hours. One the other hand, the pro is that both worlds benefit each other: I’m better at my day-job because I learn so much from my freelance work, and my freelance work is anchored in the reality of what is achievable in a library, because I work in one…

What else is there in the pro column, and does it outweigh the con column? First of all I’m going to talk about money. Even though I *know* it’s better when we’re open about financial matters when it comes to jobs, I still feel awkward and gauche! But here we go, anyway.

The Cons of hybrid freelancing

Part of your income is not guaranteed. I’m starting with the obvious one – for 10% of my time I’m relying on generating work, and if I don’t get any work I don’t get any salary. And of course if I’m ill I don’t get sick pay. This is inherently stressful, although much less so as a hybrid than as a full freelancer. On the upside, if you DO get work, it generally pays better than the day-job: my annual income is greater than if I was 1.0 FTE in my day-job.

Continuing on the subject of financial matters, you’re paying less into your pension. You can of course supplement your day-job pension with a private pension if you choose to, but you won’t get any sort of employer-matching type offer. You also have to get good at guessing what your tax bill will be, and putting aside that amount, because you’re taxed annually rather than at-source on your freelance income.

Here’s a tricky one: what does being a hybrid freelancer do for your reputation at your place of work? I’ve heard ‘oh they’re never there, really’ about people in other libraries who also do freelance work: I really, really hope my colleagues at York have never said that about me! Of course, I wouldn’t know if they did. What I do know, however, is I put absolutely everything into my day-job: I make sure I personally make a difference not just to the library but the actual student experience, and I hope this ensures no one ever thinks I see the day-job as lesser in any way to the freelancing.

The Pros of Hybrid Freelancing

I don’t want to be cheesy but the main pro is the people. As a freelancer I’ve run over 300 workshops across four continents (five if you count working online!) and I must have spoken to getting on for 10,000 people across that time: it is an absolute privilege to interact with so many professionals in my field and others, and to get so many different perspectives and experiences shared with me. It makes me better at both my jobs and it helps me understand the world from viewpoints other than my own, which is especially important as a cis, white, straight male.

The work itself is incredibly rewarding. I can only speak as a trainer, but I completely love it – working with engaged professionals who want to learn and share ideas and really get something out of the workshops. I’ve met people years later who’ve told me in detail about how they implemented ideas I’d given them in workshops and that is an uncomplicatedly brilliant feeling!

You get to travel, without travel becoming the only thing you do. I’ve had amazing opportunities thanks to freelancing, to visit South Africa and New Zealand and Australia and all sorts of places in Europe, which I’ve loved. But, I’ve also turned down a lot of overseas trips because they didn’t work for my family - as a ‘hybrid’ I can say no to things, but if I was fully freelance I may well have felt like I had to take on the trips to make ends meet.

Your worklife is inherently varied. I stayed in my previous job (Academic Liaison Librarian) for 13 years, which is a long time. Mainly it was because I hadn’t found a job I wanted to do more, but a big reason I didn’t get itchy feet was because I had constant professional *variety* and change in my freelance life.

All in all I’d say to anyone considering going freelance, try the hybrid system first to see if it suits you – the additional security it provides is really beneficial, especially when you’re first starting out!