Library Etiquette and Memes in Marketing

Don’t be like Philip!  This was one of the first photo projects that we ever undertook.  After seeing a seminar by Ben Bizzle, I really got inspired by trying to branch out with a little bit of “meme marketing”–the idea here being that if you advertise your product in a funny way, you’ll engage more with your audience.  I’ll let other people smarter than me talk about the need to market a library and just get right into what we did.

So I got the idea from old “Goofus & Gallant” comics my sister and I made fun of as a kid, and also from the “Duke & Dimwit” scenes from Bioshock Infinite.  After the initial idea, I collaborated with Phil and Gloria and we all came up with this series of photos.  Every week we would post one of these photos around 1:30 PM.  Depending on your area, that seems to be a perfect time to post.  It’s the time right after lunch when people get a little bored at work, before they hit that second wind.  By doing it in weekly installments, we were hoping people would “tune in” to see the next one.  And some patrons actually did!!

So the project basically had two goals:

• Teach patrons about the rules of the library.
• Increase traffic on our Facebook page.

One thing that stuck with me from Bizzle’s presentation was that your Facebook page shouldn’t be used just to promote programs.  That gets boring pretty fast; it should be engaging in some way.  According to a NY Times article, the average person spends about 50 minutes on Facebook a day, but (in my opinion) will only spend about a second looking at what you posted.  So adding a visual component to any post, especially if it’s original, will increase that time substantially.

Increasing our traffic was slow at first (you can’t expect 40 likes in one day,) but after a few months, we definitely noticed an increase in traffic.

Since then, I’ve always tried to have some sort of photo element in my posters/Facebook posts, like this:

Posts and posters like this aren’t just more eye-catching in the library, but become A LOT more noticeable on Facebook.  But more importantly, it got us thinking outside of the box–what else can we be doing to promote our services?

As Ben Bizzle put it, if you promote your programs only in the library, you’re only going to be selling to the people IN the library.  It’s time to branch out!!

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