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

Part 3 of the Instagram mini series (here’s the introductory part one, we’ll reference part two a little further down the page).

This is not a post about how to use Instagram well: this is a post about how to make the case to use Instagram in the first place. When I run workshops there are very often organisations represented that simply won’t yet allow the (enthusiastic, knowledgeable, social-media savvy!) attendees to set up a Library Instagram account… Sometimes there are librarians who are allowed to create the account but a little bit nervous about not being expert photographers, and we’ll talk about that as well.

The subtitle of this post is ‘10 reasons to set up a profile’ and rather than being the reasons I’d personally choose, these are meant to be reasons to give to senior managers who are not convinced setting up a library account is the way to go.

So here’s the scenario: you ask to set up an Instagram account for the Library, and the decision-makers say no. Or they say: maybe, but show us why. Below are ten potential replies, some or all of which you can try working into the conversation.

1. Rival ORG X do it…

Without wishing to be too Machiavellian about it, pointing to the success of a comparable institution who already use Insta can be useful. Not necessarily to provoke a sense of competition or jealousy, but more to say ‘it can be done by an organisation like us, and here is the proof’. (I don’t actually think libraries are ever really rivals!) It’s reassuring to have an example of success to look to, and evidence that there are gains to be had that make it worth the time it takes.

In particular, it’s worth pointing people towards specific posts, not just the URL of the comparable account itself. So you can say ‘this is how X tackled the issue of covid-etiquette in the library, and here’s the response they got’ for example, or ‘here is how Y promote their Special Collections’ - build your case with specific examples that speak to the strategy / priorities of the managers. And talking of successful examples, this leads us on to the next argument…

2. We can learn from your main account!

This won’t be the case every time, but a lot of libraries have ‘parent’ organisations which will already have a profile on Instagram. So for example your local authority for public libraries, or your University for academic libraries. In itself this is a useful precedent to cite, but it’s also genuinely useful as a way to quickly understand what your community responds to.

Generic advice on what to post can be really useful, but nothing beats taking an approach based on the evidence of what your specific audience likes - the parent org’s Insta will show you. If you work at a University you can say, as part of your proposal for a library account, ‘we already know what our students respond to most - they like video content that gives them clear instructions on how to use services’ or whatever it is you deduce from the relative popularity of the Uni Instagram’s posts.

A screenshot of a hovered-over Insta post

The actual mechanics of finding out what your audience already likes are these: go to the parent org’s Insta account on a PC (or Mac) rather than a phone / tablet, and hover over their most recent 15 or so posts in turn, noting the number of Likes and Comments for each (as show here). Some will be way higher than the average, and some will be way lower - you don’t need to be a social media analytics guru to spot trends and see what content types engage the audience most. Even for well established accounts this is an invaluable technique and I’d recommend it to everyone.

3. You didn’t let us do FB and Twitter either - but now you do

I’m sure there are exceptions but it seems like almost all libraries go through the same journey. In the 2000s they asked to set up Facebook accounts and were told no; eventually FB became so prevalent the powers that be changed their minds.

Leading up to and moving into the 2010s, everyone asked to set up Twitter accounts - no, they were told; stick with FB. Then eventually, Twitter became so prevalent the powers that be changed their minds.

And now in the 2020s it’s happening with Insta (and may well happen with TikTok also) - the same process, whilst risk-averse management get comfortable with the idea that Instagram is a) legit and b) here to stay (more on which later). So there may be some mileage in saying ‘history shows we WILL eventually get onto this platform so why not start earlier, gaining more experience along the way and reaping the benefits sooner?’

4. Instagram is the most engaged with social media platform

We covered this in detail in the previous post, part 2 of this series. The short version is the amount of people who DO something in response to Instagram posts (as opposed to people who passively consume a post but don’t press the Like button, or comment / reply, or reshare, or any other kind of interaction) is much greater that the amount of people who do something in response to Twitter and FB posts. Not only that, but libraries are part of the most engaged-with industries on Insta. So when you post, people react: that’s more important than, for example, sheer numbers of followers. It’s the first step to converting this into ‘off-site’ actions, like using resources, visiting buildings, or signing up for classes etc.

5. Instagram is here to stay

I personally wondered if Insta, with its meteoric rise, might burn brightly for a while and then fade. I was completely wrong. It is growing all the time in terms of sheer number of active users, and is predicted to continue to expand as this graph from Statista shows:

It’s also worth noting that the time spent on Insta each day by its users is also increasing according to TechJury, from 15 minutes per day at the start of 2019, to 30 minutes per day by midway through 2020.

All in all, then, Instagram seems extremely likely NOT to be one of those platforms where you invest a load of time and then see it all go to waste when the public moves on (like Snapchat was, for example).

6. Instagram is full of the younger demographic which is key to libraries

31% of Instagram users are aged 18-24, versus 17% for Twitter and 11% for FB - and in total over 70% on Instagram are 34 or under. There are a few library sectors not interesting in trying to get younger audiences to use their services, but not many: for academic libraries Insta is THE platform our students are all on, and for public libraries it’s populated by that key generation of potential library users who are younger than the overall average, but no longer children… Getting them to become life-long library users from the start of adulthood is a great goal, and Instagram can help with that.

7. You absolutely do not need to be a brilliant photographer or own a better camera than the one on your phone, to use Instagram successfully

For me Instagram has just the right amount of photo-manipulatability… Of course there are apps which allow you to do way more, but I don’t want EVERY option for editing; I just want some really useful ones. The combination of basic editing and flattering filters mean you can make the images you post on Insta look brilliant, even if you’re using a normal smartphone and don’t have a background in photography.

More importantly though, it is the subject of the image which matters most on Instagram, not the quality of the photograph. A brilliant picture of something prosaic will not get much engagement; a regular picture of something visually arresting will get Likes and Comments. (Obviously a brilliant photo of something really exciting is the best of both worlds, but the point is regular members of library staff can achieve success here without photography lessons and specialist equipment…)

8. You can now post from the desktop so staff don’t need a work account on their personal devices

Instagram was launched in October 2010. From then until the end of October 2021, you could not post on Instagram from a desktop: you had to use the app, unless you knew the hack.

That’s 11 long years for the idea to take hold that you need Instagram on your phone, and a lot of people don’t realise this is no longer the case (myself included until my colleague Megan told me about this the other day!). I’m delighted about this because I think some people, quite rightly, felt uncomfortable about having a work app on a personal device, so using Instagram instantly became something of a compromise, blurring those home-life / work-life boundaries. This is no longer the case: you can use it from instagram.com on your desktop, and keep those two worlds completely separate - potentially widening the pool of staff who feel happy to get involved with providing content for a library account.

9. IN THE CULTURAL SECTOR, INSTAGRAM USE IS HIGH

This means that there are LOADS of other libraries already there which we can learn from, and not only that but loads of museums, galleries, archives and other cultural sector organisations too. So many examples out there means it’s easier to find a model to suit the one your library would like to adopt, and means there are constant opportunities to learn, to develop new ideas, and potentially to develop partnerships too.

10. Last but definitely not least: we can improve the reputation of the library with Instagram

Instagram isn’t a hard marketing platform. (That’s part of what makes it fun to use.) What it does is keep the library in the mind of the user, showcase nice library locations, raise awareness of services and collections, and break down some barriers as to how people think about libraries in general. When used well, Insta will have a positive impact on the way your library is perceived, and help you deliver key messages. That’s argument enough for me on its own, but it’s not enough for everyone then there are nine other reasons to try above…

Good luck!

Instagram is the most engaged with social media platform, and that matters a lot for libraries

This is Part 2 of the Instagram mini-series. In Part 1 I suggested Instagram could be the thing to focus your time and energy on for your library’s social media in 2022.

Let’s talk about why Instagram is worth the time it takes to learn and do well as an institution.

3.6 billion people use social media (we’re getting close to exactly half the global population now, which is ridiculous!), and most of them do so in a very passive way most of the time. Instagram is, to invert the title of this post, the least passively used social media channel. I get asked a lot about what social media metrics matter - analytics can be overwhelming, so what should we look for? It basically all comes down to engagement rate: if you focus on that, everything else flows from there.

What is engagement rate?

In short, the engagement rate on any social media post is the amount of people who DO something with it, divided by the amount of people who see it. The ‘doing’ part includes replying or commenting, Liking, reposting, following a link, clicking on the profile of the poster etc. In other words, engagement rate shows you the relative level of interaction your posts are getting. (There are other definitions of the term, but this one - specifically known as Engagement Rate by Reach, is the one I find most practically useful.)

The ‘total number of impressions / views’ for a social media post isn’t always overly meaningful - more is better of course, but a lot of it is dictated by how big your network is already or if someone else with a large following has drawn attention to it. The great thing about engagement rate is how universal it is. Whether you have a huge network or a relatively new, relatively small one, the engagement rate can be similar.

So for example, the University I work for has an Instagram account with 38.5k followers - clearly everything they post is going to be seen way more times than the library’s Insta with its 2.3k followers, and they’re going to get way more Likes than us, making comparison meaningless. But engagement rate is still meaningful for comparison, because it is interactions divided by views, and what matters is how one performs against the other. If the University’s engagement rate is considerably higher than the library’s I know we’re doing something wrong, because the same audience is engaging more with the Uni than with us. If the figures are similar or ours are slightly higher, then I know our strategy for Insta is working well.

Engagement rates are, generally, surprisingly low. People consume social media in droves, but rarely actually react to it in any measurable way. My library’s twitter account has, at the time of writing, an engagement rate of exactly 2% over the last 28 days - and trust me, this is GOOD. My library’s twitter is a really popular, hugely engaged-with organisational profile. (2% engagement is more than 40 times better than average across all industries - to give you an idea of what is typical.) My library’s Instagram engagement rate is currently 3.56% (and that is just above the Uni’s, so we’re on track!). So if only 2-3.5% is considered a big success, why even chase this particular metric?

If you have an account with 10,000 followers who do NOTHING differently as a result of following you, this is of less value than an account with 100 followers all of whom act on your posts - after all, why are we even on social media in the first place? To inform, of course, but also to drive behaviour (in a non-sinister way) - to start conversations, to help people and to answer questions, to get people to sign up for classes or find books or click on the link to use that new resource you’ve invested in. Essentially, size of network / following is just a means to an end - that end is engagement. We want people to DO something when we take the time to craft some content online.

Instagram versus the other platforms

According to Rival IQ’s 2021 social media industry benchmark report, average industry engagement rates are as follows.

Twitter: 0.045%
Facebook: 0.08%
Instagram: 0.98%

As you can see, Instagram is stratospherically higher than the other two (more than 12 times higher than FB). I found this graph particularly interesting:

This Rival IQ graph (click to see the original report) shows Higher Ed and nonprofits as being among the leading industries for engagement rate

You’ll notice that Higher Ed is waaaay up there above all the other industries in terms of engagement, and non-profits is also ahead of all but three other industries. It also appears that less is more - three or four posts a week seems to be effective (with Sports Teams being a particular outlier here!). So not only is Instagram the most-engaged with platform, but libraries are part of the most engaged-with industries on the platform, and we don’t need to be posting every day to make it work.

A disclaimer here is that I’ve not found credible engagement rate averages for TikTok so I can’t add it to this comparison - I suspect the average would be high though.

What do we do with enagement rate stats?

So we know that people take more actions on Instagram than on other platforms. This is good because they’re proactively responding to our posts: the next step (and ultimate goal) is try and turn that into offline behaviour - or at least not-just-on-Instagram behaviour. Visiting the building, using the resource, attending the workshop and so on.

The most useful thing you can do with Engagement Rate as a statistic is record it and try and make it better. That sounds over-simplistic but it really is an incredibly productive use of your time. Don’t focus on amassing followers, or even on total views - just focus on trying to post content that people appreciate enough to do something with. Experiment with content types, with tone, with time of day and make a note of what works. If you’re current engagement rate is 0.3%, try and get it to 0.5%. If it’s higher, try and get it higher still. Make a note of the least-engaged with posts and do fewer of them. Everything else - the size of your network, and their off-site behaviour - flows from this.

With Instagram specifically, Comments and Likes are important because it’s not a democratic, merit-based platform. It’s owned by Facebook and so it has an algorithm which decides how many people to show your posts to (unlike Twitter which is pretty straightforward - if your followers are online when you post on Twitter, they’ll likely see it), and that decision seems to be influenced by how the people who HAVE seen it respond to it. So I look at the number of Likes / Comments per post, and work out from that what my library’s community responds best to, and do more of it. Every year I divide the number of posts by the number of Likes in total to get a Likes Per Post average, and compare that with the year before - if it’s moving in the right direction I know that what we’re doing is working.

It also provides a benchmark - if the average likes per post is 70, then I know that a post with 90 Likes has been especially successful, and a post with 50 Likes hasn’t quite hit the spot.

The next post in this series will be all about making the case for Instagram at your library if you don’t already have it. If you have any question about engagement rate, you can ask me a question in the comments below, and boost the engagement rate for this post!

Instagram for Libraries

If you do one thing differently with your library social media this year, what should it be?

The local knowledge you have of your library and your community always beats generic advice online - this article included - so if you already know what you want to focus on, I’m not telling you what you should do instead. Go with your instincts. But if you’re wondering about where to put your energy over the next twelve months, I’d suggest Instagram.

Twitter / X remains pretty vital to libraries, but for how long? It seems to be imploding, and people are leaving it in droves. Plus, many libraries have been developing their twitter accounts for years, whereas Instagram is still (relatively) new and can often benefit from some strategic attention.

Facebook remains essential for most public libraries, and continues to offer diminishing returns for the other sectors. I recently ran a marketing workshop for an academic library who’d lost their Facebook account through no fault of their own and were planning on starting again; don’t bother, I told them. I’d love to be free of Facebook - it’s such a problematic site and its increasingly difficult for libraries to get enough return on the time they invest in it.

Another reason not to worry too much about Facebook is it frees up time to spend on social media platforms with more impact. We only have so much time and we shouldn’t spread ourselves too thin; it’s better to do a small number of things well than be everywhere but not have time to do anything with full commitment. Which is also the reason I’m not recommending a focus on TikTok. It is the coming platform for sure: as of September 2021 it reached 1 billion users (becoming the fastest social network to do so, beating Instagram by 2.5 years) and a scarcely believable 167 million videos are watched per minute on the platform. But TikTok is something which takes a lot of time and energy, so perhaps it’s one to focus on if you’re absolutely nailing all your other social media profiles already… My biggest issue with it from a library point of view is that I can’t see a way of using it really well without the need for someone to appear on camera. If you look at @ToonLibraries (my favourite library TikTok and the best example I’ve found on how to do it well) it’s clearly the brainchild of a particular librarian with a real affinity for the platform - she’s in most videos because TikTok is a very personal medium, unlike Instagram or YouTube which can be both personal and impersonal. It requires a physical presence on screen. I’m not prepared to do that, nor ask anyone else to, so for that reason I’ve registered my library’s username so no one else can claim it in the meantime, while I wait for a suitable use case to present itself!

So to Instagram, then. It’s the third most popular social network (behind Facebook and, if you count it as social media, YouTube) with 1.4 billion active users. It is full of creative people. It is photo-and-video led but doesn’t JUST contain images. And it is, fundamentally, a nice place to market your library! It’s fun. The community are responsive. Instagram is an ever-growing site and very popular with younger people. For public and academic libraries it is essential - for school libraries it can be brilliant. For special libraries your mileage may vary.

So how do you go about using Instagram as a library, or indeed any cultural organisation? I’m starting the year with a series of posts about this: find the Instahacks mini series here.

Firstly how to make the case for creating a library profile if you don’t have one already, then getting started and how it all works, before moving onto the specifics: how to use Stories, and how to use Reels.

In the meantime you can see if I’m running any social media workshops online, or get in touch to book some training / a workshop for your organisation.

Tweeting for libraries: a handful of useful tools and examples

I ran a webinar on building engagement on Twitter during this strange lockdown times we live in, for the Living Knowledge Network run by the BL.

I ended up finding some useful tools and examples I’d not seen before as part of the research for it, so I thought I’d share those (and some classics) here, if you’re interested…

Image Resizing

Tweeting images is good: 80% of social media use happens on mobile devices, people scroll at speed - images help slow them down and engage with your stuff. (That said, I see some libraries including an image with literally every tweet. Conversely I actually wouldn’t advise this as it reduces the impact of all of them. Think of images as punctuation to your timeline, rather than the words.) If you make images the right size, people can see all of the image in your tweet, without needing to click on it to expand - which many people won’t do, so it’s good to make the most impact from the image without the need for a click.

The short version of resizing is, make your images 16:9. These are the right proportions to display correctly in a tweet. You can achieve this by using a PowerPoint slide as a template - these are 16:9 in default (since Office 2013 anyway) and you can Save As and choose .png rather than .pptx to save a slide as an image. Or, take an existing image and use photoresizer.com to get it exactly right for Twitter.

Going a step further with this, check out @nanobop’s really handy guide to posting multiple images in the same tweet. The first one in the thread below we’ve already covered, but click on it and read the follow-ups for guides to posting, 2, 3, and 4 pics at once, and the ‘open for a surprise!’ technique.

TWITTER CROP GUIDE THREAD! (1/5)

1 pic pic.twitter.com/cURbUJL3hI

— 🍬 mitch 🍬 (@nanobop) April 28, 2020

Twitter Moments

Sometimes you do something on Twitter and it goes well and you want to capture that success. Storify and a number of other tools have been great for that in the past, but are no longer available.

Step forward Twitter’s own Moments feature. It allows you to pull together the tweets of your choice into a little narrative, with an explanatory note at the top - then share it with whoever you like. Here’s a Moment I put together for my own place of work about a new space we’d launched: I used it to share all the positive feedback with non-twitter-using colleagues (and to make the success story easy to come back to later when I do an annual social media report) - you can view this Moment here.

Another example of using Moments is below - this time just to collate our own tweets and easily share them, rather than documenting feedback. We asked our users to draw our buildings, a challenge they took on so well I ended up using the fabulous Photofunia to put their images into gallery settings… This went down really well, I’d recommend trying it with your own library.

View this moment here or by clicking the image below.

A @UoYLibrary Twitter moment

Battles and other threads

There are millions upon millions of tweets every day (there’s more than 350,000 every minute…) so it’s easy for your own attempts at engagement to get lost amid the noise. One way to help them stand out is to build something more tangible and substantial than separate tweets.

Sometimes friendly institutions ‘war’ with each other on twitter - this epic #AskACurator battle between the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum drew so many eyes to it that it ended up in the papers, as did this more recent ‘creepiest object’ thread. (There are merpeople in both which are just off-the-charts horrend.) In the Library world, the ongoing good-matured spat between the Orkney and Shetland libraries twitter accounts is excellent and benefits both parties.

Threads are just a series of related tweets. If you reply to your own tweet they are connected; if someone finds one they can find the rest. You can build a thread in three main ways - all in one go BEFORE you tweet any of it (by clicking the little + symbol to add another tweet as many times as you need before you click ‘Tweet all’), in real-time where you just add your tweets as you go along - this is good for incorporating feedback and questions from your followers - and over a series of days, weeks, or even years. This example from the Glasgow Women’s Library is a thread tweeted over a month - every day more and more people found out about it and got involved, and because it was threaded rather than discrete tweets, they could find all the previous tweets very easily, whatever point they came in at…

Happy tweeting everyone.

---

By the way the header image of the balanced stones (from Pexels) was in reference to a bit about balance which I took out of the post above, but I really liked the picture so I left it in, if you’re wondering what that was all about.

8 tips for teaching library sessions online

We’ll all be teaching infolit online for the foreseeable future (I hope) and it is, as anyone who’s done much of it will tell you, a very different experience to being in a room with people.

I do a lot of training online already for overseas audiences, so I have some familiarity with this. For what it’s worth, here are some tips for retooling your sessions to work in a webinar type environment.

1. Plan your session so your audience switches frequently between listening and doing

   I don’t know how you currently do your workshops, obviously, but if for example you do a 20 minute intro, then give people 20 minutes to do a task or two, then 10 minutes summing up at the end, you may find it worthwhile to rejig this a bit.

   In the online environment where everyone is learning on screen, too much of anything for too long is a barrier to engagement. Long talky bits are really hard to pull off, and long activities don’t often work either. And indeed, long sessions overall - if you had a 2 hour class booked, make it 1.5 hours max for screen-learning.

   In my experience, relatively short bursts of talking interspersed with relatively short bursts of activity works best. So take a big exercise and split it into two; introduce part one, let them try it, introduce part two, let them try that. And so on. Short, sharp chunks. (Can you have sharp chunks? Shards, maybe.)

2. Mute participants (apart from specific times for questions)

   I always, always have participants muted as they enter the online space. If everyone’s mic is live, it quickly becomes a cacophony of noise that makes it impossible for anyone to really concentrate. (Honestly just one person having a chat with someone in the same room is enough to derail things.)

   I encourage questions at any time via the Chat (more on which below) rather than audio - however sometimes it can be beneficial for people to ask questions out loud rather than type them. If you want to do that, have a clearly designated time in the session when this will be possible, and signpost it ahead of time. “On 30 minutes we’ll pause, and anyone who wants to unmute and ask a question can do so then.” Then the conversation happens, everyone mutes again and you carry on from there.

   If you do this it’s important to wear headphones, otherwise the audience’s questions come out of your PC speakers, into your mic, and back out of the speakers again - this causes all sorts of problems and is definitely best avoided…

3. Consider using your webcam for the intro, then turning it off

   Assuming you have a webcam and video is an option, there’s a balance to be struck there too. Webcam-on for the whole session is, in my experience, not conducive to good teaching. You instinctively present to the camera, and this means you’re worrying about that side of things rather than your slides and the Chat. Especially if you’ve not done too much online teaching before, I’d keep things as simple as possible because there are so many more things to juggle than in an online session. You can choose to not use the webcam at all (that’s fine!), or use it for the intro and then say ‘now we’re moving into the session and using the slides, I’m going to turn off the webcam so you can see my screen better’.

   This is because part of each slide is blocked by your own face with the webcam. I have done a workshop where for specific reasons the whole thing was camera-on, and I found it useful to work out exactly how big the camera-window would be and create a Shape in PowerPoint that was the exact dimensions. I then put this on every slide and made sure no content was going in that part, so nothing would be obscured by the window later (which I positioned over the Shape).
   

4. The Chat function is absolutely key

   If you’re using webinar software then Chat will be a way your audience can ask you, and each other, questions. Confusingly there is also a Questions function in things like GoTo Meeting - and it’s really important to shepherd people toward Chat rather than Questions. Questions are only seen by you, but Chat is seen by all participants. Obviously if someone had a sensitive query, the DM-style Question is the way to go - but for everything else, you want to encourage active participation as much as possible. Often the difference between good online training and great online training is the Chat - the more people talk to each other and to you, the more than barriers of it being online fade away and the more useful the session becomes.

   Whether you’re using Hangouts style software or webinar software or Google Q&A, it goes without saying you need to keep the Chat where you can see it at all times. You can have particular periods of the session when you dip into it and respond to what has been asked, but seeing the questions as they come in is vital for engaging the audience. Obviously if you have a second screen this helps a lot, but if you don’t have that option it’s still worth making sure the Chat is visible to you always.

   I tell people about it at the start, and I remind them about two minutes later - I tell them about it again and again because sometimes people need encouragement to use it, but once they do everyone tends to join in. Teaching is so much richer when you respond to the audience’s specific needs, so it has to be a priority to make sure these needs are expressed…

5. Get used to not speaking

   What separates good online teaching from boring webinars is interactivity. The Chat is key to this as discussed, but so is getting people to DO things and - trust me on this - it feels really, really, weird to give people time to do activities and exercises while you sit there in silence. But it’s better to have a couple of 5 or 10 minute activities where your audience are genuinely given time to try things out and then report back in the Chat.

   I find this really tricky because you become hyper-aware of the dead air. You’re not wandering around checking what people are doing, you can’t see them working or hear them chatting to each other. You feel faintly absurd, sitting there in front of your PC and hoping people are using the time you’ve given them to do the thing you’ve asked them to do. But it’s essential - it stops it being a classic ‘boring webinar’, one-way traffic delivered as a lecture on screen which, even if you’re great at public speaking, is not enough to truly engage most audiences.

   I find the not-speaking part so hard that I set a stop-watch for it every time. If I’ve told the group they have 10 minutes, I’ll start a stop watch and not stop them until 10 minutes is up. If I don’t take this measure, I inevitably get angsty 6 minutes in and then move things on prematurely…

   I always mute my mic for these parts - no one wants to hear the click of your keyboard etc - but check in on the mic a couple of times during the period to say ‘don’t forget if you have any questions or something isn’t working as you’d expect, ask me in the chat’. When people ask a good question I’ll come back on the mic and pick it up with the whole group, just as I would with a face-to-face session.

6. You may wish to stand up…

   Teaching needs energy, and sometimes it’s hard to bring energy when you’re sitting down! If your mic and other equipment allows it and you’re comfortable doing so, standing up to deliver your session just as you would in a seminar room can really help. Without hand gestures and facial expressions it’s already hard to get your point across dynamically, so your delivery counts for a lot.

   Something solo radio DJs apparently do a lot is put something opposite them to stand-in for the audience - a cuddly toy or, in one studio I saw, a Policeman’s helmet - and they talk to THAT. Rather than talking just generally into the ether, addressing something specific (even something faintly ridiculous) will focus your delivery and make it more human. So grab some sort of mascot and stick it above your monitor…

7. If you can do online teaching in pairs, take that option

   Managing an online session is quite stressful - if anyone has technical problems you really can’t help them and teach at the same time. So pairing up, with one person teaching and another facilitating, is well worth doing if you can. The Facilitator can be on hand to help participants, both with the logistics of the online session and with the exercises themselves - they can also message the presenter to flag up a Chat question if they miss it. Working as a team in this way allows you to teach better because you’re not splitting your focus. 

8. Good slides matter more than ever

   If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know I think good slides are important. In online teaching they’re even more so, because they’re the only thing your audience can see. It’s not just that they can’t see you; they can’t even see each other. So something inspiring on the screen is really essential - especially if your online session is coming as part of many, many other sessions also online. Death by PowerPoint will not do.

   There’s plenty of guidance on this site about making good presentations. A couple of posts to start with would be the Alternatives to Bullet Points and the Sources of CC0 Images articles: but really anything with the presentations tag is potentially relevant.

   Unbelievably this general guide to slide-making is 6 years old now, but although some of the links to image sources are out of date, and, frankly, I’d make very different font choices nowadays, the basic principles are still important for producing effective presentation materials!

The 4 Most Important PowerPoint RULES for Successful Presentations from Ned Potter

Accessibility and online teaching

I don’t want to position myself as an expert on this but I do have advice on making your slides more accessible (thanks to Rachel fro the prompt!). The main thing is to use PowerPoint and turn on the subtitles function - if you’ve never used this you’ll be amazed at how well it works. PowerPoint provides subtitles of everything you say, as you say it. You can find the Settings for this in the Slideshow part of the menu:

Otherwise all the normal rules apply.

• Good contrast between font colour and background. It’s important to have plenty of contrast, for example black text on white background, so the text is easy to read. Purple on black for example doesn’t work. Related to this, don’t put text over a busy background.

• Minimum font size of 24. Anything less than 24 risks being hard to read on a small screen; if you need the font smaller than 24 there’s probably too much information for one slide.

• Use sans-serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts such as Calibri and Arial are better than Serif fonts such as Times New Roman or decorative / script fonts.

• Don’t use colour as the only indicator of key information. You will almost always have at least one colour-blind audience member. It’s important to avoid using colour as the sole way of conveying information. For example, to have something shown in red to say stop doing it and something else in green to say start doing that, is not sufficient. Use the text, or a tick and cross or other non-colour-based-visual indicator, to ensure people understand what you’re telling them.

• Repeat Chat questions back. This is good practice anyway: if someone asks a question in the chat, say it out loud for everyone to hear before answering it.

---

There’s lots more aspects of teaching online that others will be able to go into in more depth, but the 8 things above are, to my mind, key as we #PivotToOnline (as they say on twitter…) Good luck everyone!

Any questions, tips, comments, suggestions, advice? I’d love to hear it in the Comments.