Using Social Media to Build Library Communities by Scott W. H. Young & Doralyn Rossman

Author:Scott W. H. Young & Doralyn Rossman [Young, Scott W.H. & Rossman, Doralyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Adding Value with Advertising

Using Paid Promotions to Build Your Online Community

Christopher Chan and Joanna Hare

Overview

Paid advertising is an unfamiliar concept to many librarians, especially to those working in schools, colleges, and universities. Traditional advertising on television, radio, newspapers, and so forth generally only makes sense for libraries serving a large population, such as public library systems. Early forms of online advertising were similarly unsuited to smaller libraries because of the large and loosely defined audiences. Social media advertising is a very different proposition, as these platforms allow advertisers to specify with precision the audience they want to reach, in some cases to the institutional level.

Although social network services (SNS) make paid advertising a possibility for libraries that do not usually engage in the practice, you may still question whether it is worth the money and effort. It is certainly true that libraries can get a lot of value out of social media without paying, but unpaid social media strategies may only be able to take you so far. Social media advertising can also be surprisingly cost-effective even with a relatively small budget, and you will receive concrete feedback on how your advertising campaign performs. Some may be uncomfortable with spending even a modest amount of money on something as ephemeral and intangible as online adverts. However, your library is probably already spending similar amounts printing posters and ordering souvenirs—how is spending on social media advertising any different?

Moreover, there is tremendous potential for SNS advertising to turbocharge user engagement with your library’s social media efforts. For online community building to be effective, your followers need to see and interact with your posts. While paid advertising can never substitute for compelling content, it is a tool that libraries should consider deploying to ensure their social media efforts receive the attention from their community that they deserve.

Most of the social media platforms libraries are likely to engage with offer paid advertising, but our focus in this chapter will be on Facebook. This is mainly due to our experience being exclusively with Facebook advertising and also because Facebook is the dominant social media platform. There are currently no signs that it will relinquish the top spot anytime soon—at the end of 2016 it boasted more than 1.1 billion daily active users globally.1 We have also found Facebook’s advertising toolkit to be robust and user friendly. Most importantly, Facebook allows for highly specific targeting based on the data users have provided about themselves. The options available in this regard are more plentiful than even competing social networks such as Twitter, partly because there is an expectation on Facebook that users present their real identity. This is vital for libraries that cannot afford to waste limited funding on ads that fail to reach their specific community members with a high degree of accuracy.

In what follows, we will share our experiences with advertising on Facebook at our institutions, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and City University of Hong Kong (CityU). We begin with a beginner’s

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