Social Media and Libraries

Libraries were early to social platforms, enthusiastic about them for about a decade, and are now quietly rebuilding the channels they own. That arc is worth understanding, because the reasoning at each stage was sound and the conclusion changed anyway.

The underlying question never moved: how does a public institution reach people who are not currently standing in it?

Before the platforms, there were feeds

The first version of the answer was RSS. A library published a feed of new acquisitions, events or news, and readers subscribed to it in a reader of their own choosing.

It had properties that later looked valuable in hindsight. The library decided what went into the feed, the subscriber decided what to do with it, and nothing in between ranked, filtered or monetised the result. Everyone who subscribed received everything.

Feeds were part of the wider argument described in Library 2.0, and they were the plumbing under most of what that period actually achieved.

The platform decade

From roughly 2007, libraries moved onto general social platforms, Facebook and Twitter first, and the case for doing so was strong: the audience was already there, the cost was a staff member’s time, and a post could reach people who had not thought about the library in years.

Much of it worked. Service announcements reached people quickly. Events filled. Local history posts — a photograph of the same street a century ago — turned out to travel further than anything else a library published, and still do. Reference questions arrived by message from people who would not have telephoned. Individual librarians built professional networks that changed how the profession talked to itself.

The period also produced an enormous amount of writing about engagement strategy, most of which has aged badly, and a smaller amount of practical knowledge that has not.

What the platforms took back

Three things happened, gradually enough that no single year looks like the turning point.

Reach was throttled. An account with ten thousand followers stopped reaching ten thousand people, because posts from organisations were ranked below posts from friends and then below paid placement. Libraries found themselves being asked to pay to reach an audience they had already assembled.

The terms became unstable. Platforms changed rules, formats, ownership and, in one prominent case, name. Twitter’s transition to X after 2022 prompted a substantial number of public institutions to leave or to stop investing in the channel.

And the effort required went up while the returns went down. Producing video for one platform’s format is not a spare-twenty-minutes task, and a library funded to run a building does not have a content team.

What it costs to do properly

The honest accounting is rarely done. A social presence needs somebody responsible for it, a schedule, a tone that survives more than one author, a policy for what happens when a post goes wrong, and moderation of whatever arrives in reply.

Moderation is the part most often underestimated. A public institution’s account attracts complaints, abuse and occasionally coordinated objection to a book on a shelf or an event in a room, and the person who happens to run the account should not be the person deciding how to answer.

Reader privacy adds a hard constraint that commercial accounts do not have: nothing may reveal what an individual borrowed, searched for or asked about. That rules out most of what a shop would post.

What works, consistently

Across services and platforms, a short list keeps recurring.

Local history and archive images, which are unique to the institution and to the place, and which nobody else can post.

Service information — closures, changes, new hours — which is the thing followers actually want and the cheapest thing to publish.

Staff recommendations with a real voice, which outperform anything that reads as marketing.

Behind-the-scenes material, particularly conservation, cataloguing and the parts of the work nobody sees.

And answering people who ask something, which is the original use and still the most valuable.

The return to owned channels

The current direction is not away from social media so much as away from depending on it. Newsletters have come back, because an email list is a direct relationship nobody can reprice. Library websites are being treated as the place where information lives, with platforms as a way of pointing at it. Feeds, in the form of RSS and podcasts, are less unfashionable than they were. And several services have moved to platforms with open protocols, on the grounds that the same lesson should only be learnt once.

This sits alongside the rest of what a library does with the internet on its readers’ behalf, described in Digital and Media Literacy in Public Libraries and in Libraries as Community Information Hubs — the second of which is the more important point. A post reaches somebody who already follows the library. A person who walks in with a problem is reached by the building.

The whole argument can be watched happening, week by week, in the Library Web Newsletter Archive, 2007–2011, where the arrival of libraries on social platforms is reported as it occurs, by people who did not yet know how it would turn out.

Sources and further reading

Pew Research Center tracks social platform use and how it has shifted across age groups and over time. IFLA publishes guidance on public library communication and on reader privacy, which is the constraint that shapes most of the practice above. For the professional discussion as it developed, the archives of Ariadne cover the years when libraries were first arguing about it.