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.

[image or embed]

— 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

[image or embed]

— 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!

I'd like your input on what you'd like from a (possible!) new book on marketing libraries...

I’ve decided to avoid a long introduction and get straight to the point: I’d love your feedback on what a book about library marketing should contain. Here’s the form. For those interested, I’ve put the context below the embed!

I wrote The Library Marketing Toolkit in 2010, and it was published in 2011. It went incredibly well considering my relative inexperience at that time, and has become one of Facet Publishing’s best selling books ever.

However. It’s 13 years old now. That is SUCH a long time in library terms, in marketing terms, in life terms. I love the case studies in the book, but there’s not a single word of my parts I’d keep the same - it’s not that I disagree with my past self as such, I’ve just learned so much more about marketing in the intervening period. I’ve done so much marketing myself, and worked with literally hundreds of libraries on theirs - so I’d say different things if I were writing it today.

So perhaps the time is right to create a new marketing book, and before I get too far down the road with planning I wanted to get some feedback from the library road - hence the form above. If you take the time to fill in the form, or share it or this post with your networks, I’ll be really grateful. Cheers!

Library Marketing for Library Marketers Podcast

I had a great time on Katie Rothley’s Library Marketing podcast recently, guesting with Angela Hursh and Mark Aaron Polger, both of whom I’ve read a lot by and been fans of for ages.

Here’s the epsiode.

It was so good to talk with like-minded people about a subject I’m so passionate about, especially as we go on to talking about UX too, which I can talk about forever… Anyway, have a listen if you’re interested and thanks again to Katie for inviting me.

A Beginner's Guide to Instagram Reels, Stories, & the Grid: what to post where

Instagram is a fun place to market a cultural org, but it’s also a complicated space in which to work. It has so many layers and ways to post, and to a certain extent they all work together - which just makes it even more confusing to people trying to get the most out of the platform! It all makes Twitter seem very straightforward by comparison.

It is worth trying to do Instagram well, however. It’s worth taking the time to familiarise yourself with what each facet of it does, and then craft content for your audiences.

Before we go into the details, let’s look at how an Instagram account is displayed to its audience.

(Click the pic to open a larger version in a new window)

So, what do you post, and where should it go? At the time of writing, there are four ways to post Instagram content.

The Grid

The Grid is the bread-and-butter, the ‘main’ posts you put on your Instagram account. It can be photos or videos. It’s what people see when they click on your profile. You might post a few times a week to the Grid, even if you post more often to Stories.

In the library world, it’s photos of interesting things that do well here, rather than incredible photography per se. A perfect shot of a book, taken on an expensive camera, will reach fewer people than a nice picture of your library’s interior taken on your phone.

Remember: pictures of Words do not work! Shots of library interiors seem to do really well, as to shots of library exteriors… Archive photography is always popular. It’s worth noting that not all your posts have to be about your library: images of the geographic location you’re in are often popular, as in this Liverpool Uni Library example.

Shots of objects from Special Collections often get engagement, like this one from the BL.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by British Library (@britishlibrary)

Stories

Stories are 15 second videos (or a longer video broken into 15s chunks) or a 7 second-long still. They’re orientated as portrait rather than landscape or square. because they’re only really intended to be viewed on phones. They can have music and gifs and animations and - crucially - links, added to them, natively in Instagram. They do NOT appear on your grid; they’re found when people click your profile pic. They disappear after 24 hours - but they can be pinned in themes to be found later by the more curious among your followers. And the more you use them well, the more your account will grow and the greater your engagement will be with your audience… Got all that? Just in case anyone is still scratching their head, the next post in the Instagram Mini Series will be All About Stories in more detail.

Reels

Reels are a brilliant opportunity for all of us. There’s a whole post on Reels coming up, but in essence they are portrait videos, maximum 90 seconds long, and massively favoured by the algorithm. They’re shared waaaay more widely than any other type of Instagram post - the reach will be several times that of a regular video or image. (Confusingly, Reels also appear on your Grid unless you disable this, but let’s not dwell on that now!)

Here’s the kind of content that seems to suit Reels well - firstly the Book Sorter POV video which I made by literally blutacking a GoPro to a book! It’s not serious, it’s a bit silly, but it’s also introducing people to the Book Return machine by stealth…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Uni of York Library & Archives (@uoylibrary)

Music is important in Reels, so the second video with shots of the library cut to fit with the music behind it, is a type that can work well.

Instagram TV

Instagram TV is almost not worth worrying about at all. It use to be IGTV and was the home of any videos longer than 1 minute. It didn’t really work, no one watched it, so they rebranded it to Instagram TV at the end of 2021 and now all your videos go there, regardless of length - except Reels. It’s really little more than filter now - people can click on the relevant tab on your profile and see all your videos (except your Reels!) in one place - but they can find them all on your Grid anyway. The thing about regular videos - rather than Reels - is that they simply do not get seen. Instagram doesn’t share them. So even brilliant videos won’t find an audience.

The tl;dr is, focus your energies on the Grid, Reels, and Stories.

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This is Part 6 in the Instagram Series. Read Parts 1 - 5 if you’re interested.

Coming up: online marketing workshops for New Zealand and Australia libraries!

I'm absolutely thrilled to say I'm working with PiCS again, this time to deliver online training. With PiCS I've previously run marketing training in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and an emerging technologies in Auckland, and they always go all out to put on the best possible day.

If all goes to plan I'll be back in Oz in 2018 to deliver some face-to-face workshops on Presentation Skills (aimed specifically at information professionals), and in the meantime we're collaborating on three workshops online: Marketing your library (running across March, April and May), Digital Marketing and Online Tools (running in June) and Social Media: Next Steps (running across July and August).

It's all quite complicated because of running them at different times for different time-zones. Each course takes place in two sessions - 2 hours one week, then 2 hours the next week at the same time. There are New Zealand versions and Australia versions... Here are the details:

For me and Viv at PiCS trying to work out timings here has been brain-meltingly complicated, not least because in the case of the New Zealand timings I'm actually delivering them at 10pm the previous day, UK-time, for them to run at 9am Auckland time! The Australian ones are slightly more straightforward, with the training happening at 6am for me...

Anyhow, I'm really looking forward to this. All the courses are tailored for the online environment and I promise we won't be in the standard 'death by webinar' mode here: these are interactive, participatory, and hands-on workshops: you'll be DOING as well as watching and listening. It's going to be ace.

For info on the content and booking etc see the individual workshop pages linked above - for the rest of this post I'm going to use a Q&A format to explain some more about how these sessions will work.

How long are the workshops?

Each session is 2 hours long - any more than that is too much screen time in my experience. There'll be a 5 minute break in the middle, and pratical exercises throughout so it's by no means listening to me for 2 hours. Then there's a week off and a second session of 2 hours, and in between there might be some activities to explore and report back on. So in total each set of workshops will take 4 hours.

Will I be able to ask questions and interact with fellow attendees?

Yes absolutely. I use two screens, one of which has the discussion window open the whole time - so I can pick up questions as they come in rather than needing a section of the training where a moderator coordinates the questions. You can also talk to each other in the discussion. And you can message me in the session if you want to ask a non-public question.

Could I attend all three courses or is there overlap in content?

All three courses are about communciation so certain themes run through each, but none of the fundamental content is the same and none of the tasks and exercises are the same.

I came to your LIANZA marketing workshop on marketing - should I still sign up for the online version?

The workshop at LIANZA was a super-condensed version of the workshop, crammed into 1.5 hours and needing to work for 130 people! Places on these new sessions are limited to small numbers, and over more than twice the time, so the marketing one does contain a lot of material that wasn't included at LIANZA. I've also added a few new sections to the training since late 2015. However there is some overlap! So you'll hear a few things you heard previously. But I'd say there's enough new and additonal content to make it worthwhile.

I came to your Digital Marketing & Online Training full day in Auckland - should I still sign up to the online version?

I'd say 'no'. Although there's new content since the Auckland workshop, a lot of it will cover similar topics so you'll find yourself repeating exercises. Of course you're more than welcome to attend anyway! But I'd recommend attending one or both of the other two workshops (Marketing your library service, and Social Media: Next Steps) instead.

I came to your Marketing Your Library full day in Brisbane / Sydney / Melbourne - should I still sign up for the online version?

The workshop does have some new sections in since the sessions I ran in Australia but a lot of the content is similar, so I'd recommend signing up for one of the other two online workshops instead.

Can I see just the workshops listed for my time zone?

Yes you can!

Or there's more details including links to booking below:

• Here are the workshops suitable for New Zealand time
• Here are the workshops suitable for Australian time

I have more questions!

No problem, either leave them in a comment, or send me an email.

I look forward to seeing some of you online!