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

[image or embed]

— 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!

Bluesky is the one! 10 top tips for joining the growing social media platform

Bluesky is great, and it’s really starting to build now: in fact in under two months it has doubled to 12.5 million users [edit - since I wrote this 5 weeks ago it’s doubled again, to 24 million!]. It’s especially good for individuals seeking to rebuild their professional and personal networks away from the toxicity of Twitter. If that’s you, or you’re just new to the platform and wanting to make the best of it, here are ten top tips.

1) Fill out your profile first.

Generic avatars and profiles without bios give off bot vibes and generally won’t be followed - so before you start showing up in people’s notifications feed as you follow them, give them a reason to follow you back. Put in a bio, put in a pic (even if it’s not of you), put in a link if you have a website or another social media profile you’d like to highlight, and ideally write a post or two as well so people know what you’re about.

2) In some ways, it works just like Twitter.

You can post up to 300 characters in one go, you can post videos, images, links, gifs and emojis. You can reply, you can Like, you can repost, you can direct message. It looks just like Twitter too.

3) In this crucial way it does not work like Twitter: there’s no algorithm.

You know how on every other platform, you think: why oh why can’t it just show me posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order? Well I have good news for you: that is exactly what Bluesky’s default ‘Following’ feed does. However, it is a complete outlier in this respect: nearly every other popular social media platform does some version of showing you content you’ve not asked to see, and it actually takes a lot of getting used to when that isn’t provided. There’s a slower pace of life than on Twitter or Insta where your feeds have a literally ENDLESS auto-refresh going on - this reduced activity is something I’ve really learned to enjoy. But when you’re new, if you don’t get out there and follow a bunch of people, your feed will be completely dead. So with that in mind…

4) Be proactive: follow people.

For Bluesky to be of any value to you at all, you need to follow people whose posts make your feed interesting and worthwhile. There’s a number of ways you can find people to follow:

• Use Skyfollower bridge to follow the same people on Bluesky you used to follow on Twitter: I actually wouldn’t personally recommend doing this but a lot of people find the option very useful

• Find people who post content you like, and look at who they follow. I’m a big fan of cannibalising people’s follower lists, it both helps you find people you know and opens up new horizons

• Use Starter Packs. These are curated sets of accounts, usually on a theme, which anyone can create. If, like me, you work in the library industry, a Starter Pack like Alice Cann’s UK Library and Information People would be a great way to follow lots of relevant industry people in one go. The MERL have created a pack that includes libraries, museums and galleries too. I’ve now created Starter Packs for Academic Libraries, Public Libraries and Health Libraries.

• Make the most of custom feeds - these are curated feeds on a given topic. Unlike a List which is just all the posts from all the people on the list, posts only get added to custom feeds when people use the right emoji and have been added to the feed: so for example the ‘Skybrarians’ feed is a great place for info pros to find each other and share relevant posts. There’s even a custom feed for gifted articles (gift links that bypass journalistic paywalls for e.g. the New York Times). You can also use the ‘Discover’ and ‘Popular with friends’ feeds (both default tabs on your Home screen) to find new people to follow

• Simply search for topics you care about, and follow the people posting interesting things about them

Whatever you do, do SOMETHING. There have been people who join Bluesky and simply wait for something to happen. Because of the lack of algorithm, nothing does happen without proactivity, so they say ‘Bluesky is dead’ and then leave. This is a real shame! Cos it’s great.

5) Be proactive. Like, reply, and engage.

All those cliches about how you get out what you put in really apply here. You have to go beyond broadcasting and truly engage: reply to other people’s posts, join in conversations, cultivate discussion. I follow an author and illustrator called Debbie Ridpath Ohi on Bluesky, and she wrote a great post of tips for those new to Bluesky, which I’d recommend you read here. In it she posted this cartoon which sums up the whole thing perfectly. Be the two on the right!

Thank you to Debbie for giving me permission to reproduce this here. Click the pic to go to the blogpost it appears in

6) make the most of the moderation tools.

Good moderation and the ability to control who you interact with has been baked into Bluesky from the start, and it makes such a difference. Unlike on Twiter (even good old days Twitter) when you block someone they are gone completely - if they leave a comment on your post and you block them, you won’t see the comment and no one else will see the comment either. And it’s not just that you can’t see the posts of the person you blocked; they can’t see yours either, or even replies to them. And if someone Quote posts you and you don’t like it, you can detach your post from theirs so they’re no longer associated. Same with Replies. Not only that, you can subscribe to blocklists (e.g. this one) which really do starve problematic groups of the oxygen they need. It’s basically the opposite of Twitter, where, famously, hope goes to die.

7) make your own alt-text mandatory.

We all know it’s essential to add alt-text to images but sometimes you can be too quick to post and forget. Access Bluesky’s Settings, find the Accessibility section, and toggle the switch marked 'Require alt-text before posting’ and you can create accessible content every time. You can also add alt-text (and indeed captions) to videos - finally a social network which offers this! Here’s a great resource on how to write alt-text descriptions, if you want to brush up.

8) A mix of professional and personal is good.

This is by far the most subjective of these tips, so feel free to ignore it completely. But for me I think this kind of social media works well when you use it for professional purposes, but with a little personal thrown in too. If it’s all work, people don’t get to see who you are so you may not build relationships. If it’s all personal, you miss out on that fabulous opportunity for peer-support and ideas and discourse beyond the walls of your office. So, if you feel comfortable doing so, post some stuff about your hobbies as well as your job!

9) give it time.

You will not get instant results on Bluesky, but it’s worth the wait. It really feels a lot like Twitter before it went bad. Don’t give up too early; it takes to rebuild a community and spending two desultory months here and then two more distracted months on Mastodon and then giving Threads a half-hearted go is really the long way round…

10) enjoy it while it lasts!

I don’t want to end on a negative but listen: enshittification comes for us all. To quote Wikipedia:

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Right now Bluesky is in the ‘creating high-quality offerings to attract users’ stage, and they genuinely seem to care about things like moderation and protecting us all, and it’s a great place to be a part of. The more popular it becomes, the more expensive it will be to run, and we may start to move down the curve marked ‘enshitify’ - so let’s make the most of this phase. We’ve probably got a good few years, and the community is worth your time. Let’s do this.

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Notes:

• as always I’ve love this post to become more useful by other people contributing ideas. If you have more Bluesky tips, leave them in a comment!

• this is about using Bluesky as an individual - I’ve since written a few other guides for different audiences. Here’s the Researcher’s Guide to Bluesky on my library’s blog, here’s Getting Started On Academic Bluesky for the LSE Impact Blog, and here’s the Library Guide To Bluesky (aimed at institutions) on this site

• the particular blue sky at the top of this blogpost was captured by me in the Pentland Hills near Penicuik, a town in Scotland, where the landscape is beautiful and the sheep look quite angelic when backlit

Where should libraries go now Twitter *HAS* become a wasteland?

Or: Nomadic social media part 2: libraries in the post-Twitter age

Just over a year ago I wrote ‘Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?’ and this is a spiritual successor to that earlier post, a check-in on the current state of play - and also a Part 2 to this article I wrote about Nomadic Social Media for Librarians (as opposed to libraries).

Why is this the post-Twitter age?

There are so many reasons libraries need to think about a strategy for being ex-X, but here are the most important:

1. X might not even survive. Musk has driven away advertisers and lacks the discipline to win them back, so bankruptcy is a realistic possibility

2. There may be a charge for use soon. Even if it’s $1 a year and you can get permission to subscribe, do you really want your library to financially support a place where hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation are all spiking and the CEO is now actively promoting horrific toxic accounts and white supremacists?

3. A senior manager at another institution mentioned to me recently that it will soon cause too much reputational harm to be associated with X to justify the potential comms benefits of being there. But that takes up neatly on to…

4. It just doesn’t work anymore. Some niche areas of Twitter are managing to plough on, but in general it’s broken. Engagement is way down. It’s a haven for the worst people, and huge numbers of library-audience-type-people have left - so replies, ReTweets, just plain views for tweets are all tiny compared to what they once were. Twitter Analytics doesn’t work. The hateful conduct policy has been adjusted to, in essence, allow more hateful conduct. Musk has changed the algorithm so suppress links to news sites or posts that mention things he doesn’t like (I saw a tweet from an account with 58,000 followers which had fewer than 1,000 views, because it was about Bluesky) - so you can be a Twitter marketing genius and STILL not reach your own users with relevant content

All in all, at the very least you need a plan for what to do after Twitter. My own library is still there for now, but the second the subscription charge comes in we’re absolutely gone, if not before. The question is, where do we go, and what is the strategy?

What should libraries do next?

There’s no universal answer to this because it varies by sector.

University and College Libraries need to focus on Instagram

Instagram is absolutely crucial in HE, and not just to libraries. All professional services and departments need to get on there because it’s the only place almost every single undergraduate is on. Almost none of them are on Facebook, hardly any are on X, if they’re on LinkedIn they’re not there to interact with the library, and even email (the one channel literally every UG should be reachable on in theory) is largely ignored unless it is super-specific and very targeted.

I wrote a thing on Instagram for the Times Higher recently which goes into all the details about why Instagram is so important, lays out out some statistics, and gives some advice on how to use it well. Rather than recreating it here, for those working in FE and HE take a look and let me know what you think.

click the image to go to the article, which is free to read

Why not TikTok? Well it’s is not a universal thing for the University demographic (but almost is for the age group below), although it is a Big Deal so if you can spare the time and resources to do TikTok well, by all means get on there. But my advice would be to prioritise Instagram first of all, for its wider appeal and simpler methods for getting key messages to users.

Public Libraries need to up their Instagram game whilst not neglecting Facebook

For all Facebook’s problems (across all demographics except 55+ people are leaving FB, but so many 55+ are on there it is still the biggest social network - and daily use is consistently falling whilst leaping ever upwards on Instagram and TikTok) it remains a really useful tool for Public Libraries. It can act almost as a branch online, and Cape May County Library in the US and Hampshire Library Service in the UK are good examples of places doing that well.

There is a BIG amount of book chat on Threads, so this may be a conversation public libraries can tap into.

However, I think Instagram is the coming platform for this sector - and at the moment some libraries aren’t allowed it or are under a lot of restrictions as to how they can use it. Eventually this will change! So be ready when you’re given the green-light.

Here are some previous posts you may find helpful:

• Making the case for Instagram at your library: 10 reasons to set up a profile

• My own library’s Instagram guidelines

• (the most read Insta article on this site) A beginner’s guide to Instagram Reels, Stories & the Grid: what to post where

School Libraries probably need to focus on TikTok, but it’s not that simple

TikTok is, by far, the most popular platform among teens. If you’re a school library looking to appeal to students in your school, then here’s a good example of a normal, successful TikTok school library account in Medford.

If you’d like an example of what can happen a school library TikTok account really takes off, look no further than GVHSlibrary. They have over a million Likes so far, Nicki Minaj has commended their vibes in a comment, and Kelsey Bogan, the librarian in question, is just generally smashing it.

I love this post: it’s about ditching Dewey (yesss! In your face Dewey you massive racist) and seeing circulation climb by 600%, and it has been viewed over 1 million times! I mean, come on.

@gvhslibrary Getting rid of the old ways & embracing the new is resulting in more #students using the #library = #win #librariansoftiktok #librarytiktok #progress ♬ Walter White Rap - Mr Cool

If you’re interested in finding out more about Miss B’s approach, here’s a good article she wrote.

So why the ‘but it’s not that simple’ in the section header? Well, not all school library social media is aimed at the students. If your target audience is the parents, then things are lot more complicated - Twitter would have been good but isn’t any longer, which really leaves Facebook as a the primary method of reaching that audience. Not great, but worth doing for now if parent-engagement is part of your strategy. (The previously mentioned book-chat on Threads means it may be useful for school libraries in the future too.)

Special Libraries - Pharma, Health, Law etc - may need to spend more time on LinkedIn

The smaller and more specific your audience, the more useful LinkedIn is. If your library service can connect with every solicitor in your law firm, you’ll get useful intelligence that will prompt useful interaction.

As you’ll have guessed by now I’m pretty sure most libraries can benefit from a focus on Instagram, but that isn’t a universal truth. I’m not sure a Pharma or Law library will have much joy there. Health Libraries have more potential as there is a huge amount of use among healthcare professionals on the platform (specifically including while they’re at work, which is of course the ideal time to hit them with useful info!) but I’ve not yet seen a health library account totally cleaning up on Intagram - that’s not to say there isn’t one though! If you spot one, let me know.

What about Twitter / X alternatives like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Discord and Spill?

None of these appear to be a good place for library accounts at the current time. I know of a handful of libraries and archives now on Bluesky, and I hope they make a go of it, but there’s not exactly a flood of case studies for the rest of us to learn from. (The Bodleian are also there and doing brilliantly as always, but both they and the British Library have such immense cultural capital I’m always wary of taking their success as a true indication that the rest of will also succeed somewhere…) I’ve created a Bluesky list of libraries and archives on the platform, for those already there, which I’ll keep adding to as we go along, so the rest of us can see how the early adopters are doing and adapt accordingly!

If you’ve read Part 1 of this post you’ll know I’m all in on Bluesky as the long term Twitter replacement for us as librarians, but I’m yet to see enough a movement from our target audience towards the platform to think it is ready for the organisational / institutional side of things.

I don’t know of any libraries currently making Mastodon work well (again, please let me know if I’m wrong! I’d love examples of orgs rocking Mastodon) and the somewhat chaotic effect of the multi-server the platform has means you could end up putting in a LOT of work and really only reaching your peers, not your target audience.

Discord was talked about a lot when Twitter first started going downhill, but it longer really gets mentioned as a viable alternative. It consists of several smaller, focused networks rather than one big one, so is unlikely to be suitable for a library’s needs.

Threads is an interesting one… In Part 1 I discussed the issues with it (very small active user group, not available in the EU [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads has become available in the EU after all]) but there are libraries making it work, for sure. Check out LMUlibrary for a great example. A real problem with it is once you’ve enabled your Threads account, it cannot be deleted unless you also fully delete your Instagram. So if you decide to give Threads a try and it doesn’t really work out, your threads account will be other there more or less forever, representing your library even though it’s not being actively used.

As part of a pilot at University of York my own library is on Threads, and we have a relatively health number of followers. Our posts get some engagement but I’m not convinced we’re nudging the needle on behaviour - fundamentally I put time into library social media because I want our users to actually DO something because of it. At the moment Threads feels very much like a classroom with no teachers - all the social media admins for brands and orgs are having a great time and producing some genuinely funny content, because no one is checking on them… I sort of enjoy this, but I also don’t want to sink any time into it because whilst I could try and make @UoYLibrary a fun Threads account that people generally like, that wouldn’t actually help me further the library’s strategic aims. That is the bottom line, and why we’re on social media at all.

Spill is an interesting site that may become a viable Twitter alternative in time, launched last year by former Twitter employees and specifically aimed at creating safety for diverse communities. You can read more about it here - at the moment it’s still in Beta and there’s a waiting list to join, so it’s hard to assess in greater detail, but I’d love this one to take off.

Have I forgotten anything important? let me know below

I always encourage comments but have recently realised my Comments box wasn’t displaying properly so no one could leave any… A short CSS code-injection later and that should now be fixed - so if I’ve left out a key issue or a key platform, I’d love to hear your perspective!

Nomadic Librarian Social Media in the post-Twitter age

Do you remember that feeling when Twitter first started working for you, and you were suddenly tapped into this seemingly infinite network of other people in your profession, who shared experiences and ideas and perspectives and guidance? What an amazing time that was; I absolutely loved it.

I got into librarianship in 2006, but it only really came alive for me in around 2010 when I got online. In 2011 I joined Twitter (thanks as ever to Bethan Ruddock and Laura Woods for persuading me that my doubts about it were misplaced!) and really everything changed. It led to all sorts of opportunities, but the thing I appreciate most about the platform is the sheer number of voices it has allowed me to hear - I got so many useful insights I wasn’t getting within the walls of my own institution. My eyes were opened, my knowledge was expanded, my politics moved even further to the left and I changed. Twitter changed me, for the better.

Twitter is now untenable

However, since Twitter became X it has become untenable and it is only the sheer power of the relationships I built over 12 years that has kept me there this long. There is no other brand or organisation run by a white supremacist that I would consider giving my time to; it feels deeply uneasy to be part of something so incredibly toxic, because you feel complicit.

I’m not deleting my account (yet) mainly because I don’t want anyone else using the alias, but I am officially leaving the site from Christmas - no longer logging in or posting. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone else what to do but if you’re still there, I’d recommend at least considering getting out too.

Need some reasons to leave Twitter?

1. Hate speech, harassment, extremist content and misinformation have all spiked since Musk took over

2. Musk himself has said some abject things, including describing antisemitic conspiracy theories as ‘the absolute truth’, and threatened violence against his enemies

3. Musk has reinstated previously-banned white nationalists and whole host of incredibly toxic accounts which he’s now actively promoting, whilst deleting accounts of journalists he doesn’t like and reducing traffic to news sites

4. Honestly there’s just an endless list of things. Even just researching enough to list points 1-3 above is so bleak, I don’t want to do any more; every day there’s something else awful he’s done, just google his name and you’ll see the latest

So what happens next for libraries and librarians? Originally this one post about both those categories, but it got ridiculously long so I’ve moved the bits about libraries into a separate Part 2. Let’s focus first of all on us, the people working in the cultural orgs, which is the slightly less complicated side of the coin in some ways.

Social media for librarians, information professionals, and others who work in cultural organisations

So here’s a massive disclaimer about this section: it is VERY subjective. (The bit about libraries and social media in part 2 is far more objective.) It’s based on my experiences and my preferences. Your mileage may vary.

I have now been actively looking for and posting on Twitter alternatives for over a year, and this is what I’ve concluded. (tl;dr Bluesky is the closest equivalent to early Twitter, and I whole wholeheartedly recommend getting yourself an invite code if you can.)

Threads just isn’t quite happening for librarians

I wanted Threads to work, so I joined early and optimistically. I followed lots of library friends, plus a few larger accounts, newspapers and the like. And what I’ve found is, my feed is 90% posts from the Guardian etc and hardly any from the library people. (There is apparently loads of book-chat on Threads, but not so much library chat.)

Part of the reason for this is that Threads is unavailable in the EU. So the entirety of European librarianship, pretty much, is absent from the discussion. I love European librarians and want them in my network! [EDIT: since I wrote this post, Threads as become available in the EU! This may change everything and make Threads a viable network for librarians over time, we’ll have to wait and see.]

Threads famously became the fastest growing new social network ever: while Facebook and Twitter both took over 2 years to reach 10 million users, Threads took just 7 hours. There are now 137 million people with accounts - but that doesn’t matter. What mattes is active users. There are around 10 million active Threads users, who only spend 3 minutes a day on the app. (Obviously, 10 million is a large number - but compared with 200 million active Twitter users, or 2.35 billion active Instagram users, clearly there is simply less conversation to be had there.)

So my Threads account lies dormant, with a post basically saying: I’m putting my eggs in the Bluesky basket.

Instagram is essential for libraries but potentially less so for librarians

I enjoy Instagram but I am there as a drummer, not as a library professional. I do follow some librarians on there and enjoy their posts, but they tend to be about their lives rather than their work.

My experience has been that Instagram’s primary focus on video, then on image, and then on words, means it’s not as suited for a professional network in our particular profession (and a lot of info pros aren’t there on principle because it’s a Meta product) - but actually this is probably too limited thinking on my part. Naomi Smith is making the @blackandgoldeducation critical librarianship account work on Instagram, and points out:

There are many people, organisations who are interested / amazed by ideas of #critlib and share similar values especially younger audiences which is the main instagram demographic

LinkedIn is actually pretty good after all!

I have been so sneery about LinkedIn over the years, put off by some performative posting I saw in the early days, and the (rightly earned) reputation the platform has for being a home to the ‘I get up at 4am and have already done 3 workouts and boosted productivity in my companies by 6% by the time you have breakfast!! hashtag #stayhumble’ brigade. HOWEVER I was basically wrong, because like almost all communities, the thing it’s most famous for is not what it’s actually like for most people there.

Connect with the right people (oh hi!) and LinkedIn is a friendly, supportive place where you get useful updates about what is going on in the industry. It’s also a good place to share ideas, with decent numbers of people reading posts on there, and people actually leave comments and ask questions - posting on LinkedIn feels like blogging felt about 10 years ago!

The only downside is it’s almost all professional, and I love a little bit of personal mixed in - I want to know about who we all are as people, as well as what we achieve in our jobs. But basically if, like me, you’ve written LinkedIn off in the past, give it another go because you can be part of the good bit of it…

Mastodon is good, but it’s not quite the Twitter replacement I craved.

When I joined Mastodon I initially really enjoyed it, but several small things have meant that optimism was short lived. It doesn’t look great or feel that good to use - it’s a little clunky - and there’s well documented issues with finding people across the federated servers. There are also lots of examples of being people scolded for doing the wrong thing on Mastodon, though I’ve not experienced this myself.

More than that though, the biggest issue for me is I just find myself scrolling for a long time on the platform before I find content I’m interested in. The conversation just doesn’t quite seem to match up to what I need from a professional / social network mix - and that’s very much a personal thing so you might find the chat absolutely hits the sweet spot for you.

I had an interesting chat with a BlueSky user called Mx Vero who said Mastodon DID work better for them than Bluesky - in particular the code4lib.social server, which leads me to speculate that the info pros at the more technical end of librarianship are more likely to find Mastodon useful, because the are less likely to be put off by the technical hurdles to getting set up on the platform in the first place. So there’s a greater amount of conversation to be had in that area of libraryworld, on Mastodon.

Someone on Bluesky asked ‘why didn’t Mastodon work for ya’ll?’ and one of the answers was this:

“It felt a little like eating something because it was good for you but not something you enjoy”

This sums it up well: Mastodon has a great community but the vibe - I’m bringing out all the scientific terms now - is just slightly off, for me personally. Which brings us to…

Bluesky. I’m all in: Bluesky is the one.

I am only two months in to being part of this platform, but I really, really like it. It feels VERY twitter circa 2015 - not least in visual style as it is made by the same people who made Twitter in the first place, but just in terms of the way it feels and the conversations we’re having there.

The hit-rate of stuff I’m interested in versus total posts to scroll through is much higher than anything since several-years-ago-twitter, and there’s a real sense of a community sharing updates and ideas. It seems to have a good mix of serious and fun.

You need an invite code to join (which is part of the reason it’s not overrun by far-right people) - just ask on your other networks and chances are someone will message you with one. We all get one a week to give out to people. When you get there, say hi!

Click the image to view my profile (if you're already on Bluesky!)

I asked others why it worked for them: Alice Cann said:

“I found library and related people here on BlueSky immediately and there are a core amount of people posting quite often”

Selena Killick said:

“Ease of use and the fact that Librarian twitter seems to have moved here has helped”

…and several others chimed in with similar views. Arianne H. said:

“Once I figured out how they work, I have found the feeds to be a really useful way to keep up with library related conversations, especially Skybrarians. I like that feeds are created by users.”

Feeds are, I think, like Twitter lists but intended as a much more public-facing thing rather than a personal one. Here’s the skybrarian feed link for those already on the platform - thanks to Andromeda Yelton for setting it up!

manu schwendener said:

“Best feature for me: that their roadmap and issues are public”

…and also has some useful guidance on first Bluesky steps, including using Follower Bridge to reconnect with your Twitter contacts. It’s a pretty manual process that will take a while if you follow a lot of people, and it’s a bit hit and miss (if you follow someone called ‘Dave’ on Twitter it’ll find someone at random called Dave on Bluesky and be like, hey I think we got him!) but a good jumping off point. As always though, a reliable way to jump start your community building is this:

1) Set up your profile - bio, pic, a first post - BEFORE you start following people, so when they get the notification of the new follow and potentially click on your profile, there’s something for them to see

2) Find a librarian you like, click on the list of people THEY follow, and canabalise it

On top of all that, the way the community is building organically is really nice. Threads felt like a mad rush, with everyone joining and then almost immediately leaving (albeit not deleting their accounts because you can’t without also deleting Insta), while Mastodon felt like a party that had already been going for a while before you got there, and has certain rules and norms you’re not fully up to speed with. Bluesky just builds slowly, and because you get an invite code per week to give out, people are gradually bringing others into the fold and more and more people we all want to see there are arriving.

Here’s the real test of which social network you most identify with - which profile do you put in your speaker bio and on your first and last slides..? I’ve changed mine to Bluesky. I’m all in!

What is the longer-term prognosis for librarian social media?

The answer to this questions is of course that I don’t know, but there’s a couple of things worth bearing in mind. One is that even if, say, something else comes along in two years that we all end up switching to, two years is a long time! Two years of being a networked librarian able to tap into support and ideas beyond your institution, even if imperfectly, is so much better than nothing. But the other thing is, I don’t think we’ll ever get another Twitter. Not in terms of the sheer focus of dialogue in one place - the world and the online landscape is too fragmented now, so we’ll split off into smaller communities.

I’d love to be wrong about this of course. But if we do end up with lots of options, the important thing is not to let that put us off. Pick one, try it, and see if it’s for you. If it’s not, move on. If it is, go all in. Because we’re all better off for having a way to benefit from our professional community online - I hope you find yours!

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Read the Library-focused follow up to this post here: Where should libraries go now Twitter has become a Wasteland