Hello LHRT, it's your friendly neighborhood Social Media Coordinator. There have been some changes to LHRT socials, and Brett and I thought it a good idea to write about these updates. I'd like to start making somewhat regular updates, so with this being (more or less) the beginning of the fiscal year, I wanted to take this opportunity to start.
Linked accounts:
Prior to this year, only one of our existing social media platforms was compatible with automatic posts linked to the blog, and this is Facebook. After Twitter was bought out by X, cross-posting was no longer available, and required direct posting. Considering this and considering the recent changes at the federal level regarding library funding and leadership, we at the blog thought it reasonable to no longer use this platform, and we have since created a Blue-Sky account, which fortunately can be linked to the blog for automatic cross-posting.
Non-linked accounts:
Another of the accounts inherited from previous coordinators was Instagram. Instagram is primarily a visual media platform, so it's more difficult to cross-post from News & Notes without making some sort of visual thumbnail. I've primarily been using Instagram to showcase artifacts from the blog's Virtual Librariana Museum or creating images for updates, mostly regarding LHRT Reads selections. Sometime earlier this year, Instagram changed their image dimensions from a square ratio to a portrait rectangle, resulting in older posts not appearing correctly in thumbnail view, but I've since corrected the dimensions in Canva, so new posts (since March) are appearing properly.
New Accounts:
This year I created 4 new accounts – 3 social media accounts and 1 new email. Prior to this, LHRT had multiple Gmail accounts, one for each social media platform. I created a new email that is tied now to all the social media accounts, except for Facebook, which does still require a personal account to be linked to a business account or public page. I'd like to invite all LHRT to send me (via the LHRT Socials Gmail) anything they'd like to post to any account here. I'm not sure if there was any method prior to me taking over where LHRT members could request something to be posted but speaking with Brett we decided to give this a try. The other social media accounts are YouTube, Blue-Sky (mentioned previously), and Storygraph. YouTube was requested so we had a place to upload and share LHRT webinars, Blue-Sky was requested as a replacement for X, and Storygraph was something I wanted to try to reach a more reading-focused community. Storygraph was created to be a competitor to Goodreads (an Amazon affiliate), and through this platform, members can host read-a-longs, buddy reads, or virtual book clubs. There is also a place where users can sponsor a give-away.
For each of these new accounts, as well as for the older accounts, I've tried to create a brand consistency across the platforms.
Engagement Trends & Account Insights:
Facebook: 1.3K followers
Instagram
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Hannah Mabry Wang
She/Her/Hers, They/theirs
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