Marketing libraries with social media

Oh dear, Cam23 fatigue has definitely hit me now. I can't decide whether it's a bad thing to be playing catchup to practically everyone else (those unread blog posts labelled Thing 23 sitting in my reader are possibly the most depressing sight I've seen all day, and it's been raining), since I'm almost certainly rehashing territory everyone has already explored with a finetooth comb, or whether it's good, since it means I can read all these wonderful posts and work out why a Thing has worked for one person, why it hasn't for another, and what of it might be useful to me.

Nevertheless, blog I must, and so on to marketing with social media. As I've just mentioned, there are many wonderful posts by many others on the programme, so I'll try and add my own take on it. I think most people agree that it is important that your library doesn't just dive in, without really taking the time to consider what it's trying to achieve. I've noticed from reading others' posts that opinion is divided as to how much time marketing on social media is likely to take. Some are fervently in the camp of "it's so quick and easy" while others are much more circumspect - largely I think because they realise that it's not enough to set up a Twitter account, or a blog, but that it must be frequently updated. Yes, it does only take seconds to write 140 characters, but how long did you spend on planning how your web voice would sound? How much time was spent formulating a policy about when and what to update? I'm not saying it would necessarily take a long time, perhaps only minutes, but that all needs to be accounted for in the budget!

I work in a library which is great in size and small in manpower. Our users range from school students doing projects, to serious academic researchers, to people who just like a quiet and sunlit space to work that's not too far from a café, to people who've just come in from the street to get out of the rain and thought we were the café. Just last week we even had a chap visit asking for somewhere quiet to sit and inject himself with insulin! I think we'd have to seriously look at what we can offer these different groups of people before I start thinking about how best to use the most appropriate social media to address the gap between the user and the information we offer. I thought Aidan Baker's approach to marketing made a lot of sense here.

I'm not sure I can really say what might be best to try in our library. Perhaps a more concerted effort to bring new books to people's attention would be a start. We get some lovely exhibition catalogues from places like the Tate and the Royal Academy, after all. However, I think that we as a library get lost behind the institution as a whole, and people often come in and say "I've been coming here for years and didn't know there was a library" - so I think we have a bigger problem to address first!