Social Media @ New York Public Library

Sunday, Oct. 2nd, 2:15 - 3:30
NYPL's Digital Producer, Lauren Lampasone, gave us an overview (with a very snazzy slide presentation!) of the really cool stuff they are doing with social media. While NYPL has many more employees (in some cases MANY, MANY more) than the library where you may work, a lot of these ideas are easily implemented.

Lauren went over NYPL's use of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and crowdsourcing.

Blogs
Over 100 staff members write blog posts for NYPL. Lauren encourages each blogger to have their own voice and write about what interests them.
NYPL uses blogs for:

• timely and timeless information
• fostering discussion with members of the community
• links
• lists

Staff blog about:

• TV shows
• Movies
• Music
• Books
• Places: they have a "Ticketless Traveler" channel which features book, music and film recommendations tied to a place.
  
• Their collections: local history, special collections, maps, etc.
• Their community: they do a "My Library" post which regularly features an interview with a community member using the library.
  

Within all of these posts, Lauren encourages links to other websites, NYPL catalog, NYPL resource lists, etc.
The more bloggers you have, the less pressure there is for bloggers to write. With over 100 bloggers, NYPL has approximately 2-3 posts going up each day.

Twitter
NYPL has a Twitter schedule, with regularly scheduled tweets from:

• collections
• programs
• marketing team
• reference
• customer service
• retweets from the community

They use HootSuite for prescheduling tweets and assigning tweets to users. They also use SocialFlow, which keeps track of Twitter conversations and optimizes when your tweets get published.
Lauren's hot Twitter tip: Users love quotes! They tend to get a lot of retweets, replies, etc. But we are librarians, so be sure to link to or site your source!

Facebook
NYPL has an editorial calendar, so they are aware of what events, holidays, etc. are going on in the world and can post relevant content at their FB page.
Popular FB content:

• Ask a question
• videos
• photos and slideshows

Social media feeds on itself. Use FB and Twitter to spread the word about your blogs.

Foursquare
Lauren didn't have too much to say about this tool. She said NYPL uses it, have done a promotion where people get a badge for checking in a certain number of times or at a certain number of places.

Crowdsourcing
NYPL uses crowdsourcing for 2 cool projects:

• What's on the menu? a project to transcribe their historical restaurant menus
• Map rectifier a project to digitally align historical maps with modern Google maps

Training and Support
For these social media tools, NYPL has:

• Two training levels
• Internal documentation and policies
• ongoing support/miniconferences

In summary, Lauren's session was filled with amazing ideas, but many would need to be scaled down for a smaller library. We can all look to what NYPL is doing for inspiration when we dive into the world of social media for the first time, or if we want to take our library's use of social media to the next level.