facebook | David Lee King

When Facebook goes down – do you have other options?

October 6, 2021 By David Lee King

A couple days ago, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all Facebook apps) went down for about six hours. Globally.

That’s a pretty big deal these days! I was affected just a teeny, tiny bit – I had a meeting about Instagram goal-setting for 2022, and couldn’t pull up current Instagram stats to share with the team.

Other people and small businesses who depend on one or more of these apps as their main communications platform were basically silenced for a good six hours. Not good!

They were down for approximately 6 hours, and are all back up again. So yay for that. But next time something major like Facebook goes down for a day … what can you do so your library isn’t completely silenced?

Thankfully, this is pretty simple. The answer is … Make sure you have multiple ways to communicate. And make sure those communication platforms aren’t all owned by the same company (i.e., Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.).

For example, my library can currently communicate these ways:

Our website. This is your main communication channel, and one of the few that you probably own.
Our email list (all card holders give us their email address, which we use for our enewsletter). Also one we own.
Social media. My library is active in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If one goes down, we can still talk to our customers using other social media channels.
Media contacts. Our marketing department has a list of local and national media outlets that we can send press releases to, and that we all on if needed.
In-building communications – physical and digital signs, and library staff actually sharing info with customers.

There are probably others! My point is a simple one – don’t put all your eggs in one basket (as the saying goes). Make sure you have and use multiple communication channels, owned by different companies. Make sure you own some of them yourself, too (like your website and your email list).

And make sure you use more than one way to share your amazing library content with customers. Normally, that simply assures that more people hear about your cool new thing. But in times when something major goes down for a day (or more), you will still have multiple ways to communicate with your customers.

Simple Social Media Posts Work Great

July 16, 2019 By David Lee King

You can read tons of blog posts, articles, and books (including mine!) about what to post on social media.

But sometimes, tried-and-true – and simple – works great.

What do I mean? Here’s an example from my library. We regularly post a simple question on our Facebook Page: “What are you reading?”

That’s all we ask. No image with it. Just 4 simple words.

Guess what? Those posts get a TON of interaction! Look at the screenshot included in this post. Our “what are you reading” post from June 5 received:

201 Comments
19 Likes
1 Share
2 Loves
652 Engagements
5186 People Reached
Ok, also 4 Hide Posts and 2 Hide All Posts (probably because those people interacted with the post, and then their phones blew up with activity).

What’s going on here? I think it’s pretty simple, and involves two things:

It’s on-brand.
We are talking to book lovers.

On brand: This post is definitely on-brand for us. We are, after all, a library. So it makes a lot of sense for us to … say … post about books once in awhile, right?

Talking to book lovers: When we post to our Facebook Page, we are starting conversations with people who chose to click Like on our Page. They chose to follow their local library, and (hopefully) to see some content and have some interaction with us. We don’t have to convince this group that they’ll be interested in what we do – they know that, and want to share what they are reading. Pretty cool!

One other thing going on here. When we ask “What are you reading?” we also end up with a great list of books that our local community is currently reading. That gives US some great content that we can re-use as needed. We can turn it into blog posts, book lists in Bibliocommons, or book lists in our print or enewsletters that we send to customers.

All done with 4 simple words.

Facebook Community Boost Event

September 11, 2018 By David Lee King

Facebook recently held a Facebook Community Boost event in Topeka, and I attended. It was an interesting day and a half of learning about using Facebook and Instagram for a business or organization.

I mostly attended Instagram sessions, but also learned a little more about Facebook Ads.

Here’s what I heard about Facebook:

Gain more Reach by Boosting a post. That effectively turns the post into an ad.
Using a Call to Action button on an ad helps drive people to that next step.
One local restaurant mentioned that they created a Wednesday night special ($5 burgers), boosted that info on Facebook, and went from $4000 in sales to $10,000 in sales. Wow.
They talked a lot about using the Ad creation tools to help focus your ad on people likely to respond.

Things I heard about Instagram included:

50% of Instagram Stories are short videos
60% of Stories are watched with the sound on
Business goals for Stories include sales and promotions, launches of a new product or service, exclusives, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes content.
People are using the Hyperlapse app to tell a longer story in a short amount of time
75% of people will search, share, and shop after being inspired by your post.
Feed posts are a glimpse into your business; Stories are a more casual, personal way to share
If you really like your Story, save it to share in your feed, or highlight it to make it permanent.
Polling Stickers in Stories are pretty cool. They provide real-time feedback in a simple poll.

They also briefly talked about IGTV – Instagram’s new way to include longer videos. There’s a separate app, and there’s a clickable icon in Instagram too (apparently just rolling that out).

When should you use the different ways to post in Instagram?

Feed – for someone who might not know about your business
Stories – a way to engage with followers daily.
Instagram Live – a way to connect to followers in real time
IGTV – a place to post longer videos

Finally, here’s a couple of useful tutorial and toolkit links:

Facebook Blueprint – Tutorials on using Facebook for business.
Instagram | Business – Tutorials and toolkits on how to use Instagram for business.

I’m glad I attended! If you have the chance, attend if one of these events is headed to your area (they said there are about 12 more scheduled at the moment).

Image by Ethan + Anna