We held a staff development session last week that focussed, primarily, on the social media channels the library uses to reach different audiences. For those who couldn’t make it, I thought I’d create a cheat sheet.
First of all, why do we do this?
The function of the Library Marketing Group is to support the Library in raising its profile and promoting its collections, services and staff
How do we do this?
| Medium | Target Audience | Tone | Content example |
| UC Library News | All library patrons | Relatively formal | Opening hours changes; upcoming workshops, exhibitions, Image of the Week |
| Undergraduate students | Informal, friendly | Information Literacy Content (How to…)
Promoting our staff, collections and events as relevant for UG students Book culture (aka memes!) |
|
| Postgraduate students and academics* | Informal, friendly | Promoting our staff, collections and events as relevant for research students
Talking about research tools, research services, best practices etc. |
|
| Insider’s Guide | Undergraduate students | Relatively formal | Promoting our staff, collections and events in weekly UC-wide newsletter emailed to all undergraduate students.
RSS feed in LEARN means students also see links to articles in their LEARN pages |
| All library patrons | Informal, friendly | Pretty, pretty pictures of the library, collections and events. |
*We have been trialing targeting this audience in 2018
As you can imagine, sometimes coming up with content on a regular basis can be taxing and the awesome staff who keep these accounts and pages going can feel like this:
which is a furry way of saying “send us content!”
Cool photographs, information about a cool new book in your collection, a great new database, details for the workshop you’re running in a couple of weeks, funny memes….. we want it all!
Don’t worry too much about deciding what platform it’s to go on – just email it to librarymarketing@canterbury.ac.nz and we will take care of the rest – and be very grateful:)
Excellent summary, thanks very much.