Design, citizenship and the city
12 March 2010
A common social media dilemma solved:
Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
How many accounts do you need?
The simplest approach, for you, is just to have one account on each service. You might have a Twitter account that covers everything in the whole library service, a Facebook page which people can “fan” and get updates, and a Flickr account where you post all your photos.
With all these accounts, you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of cross-posting, too. Some of your photos — possibly all of them — will go on Facebook as well as Flickr. Twitter doesn’t handle photos very well so you might find yourself posting links to Flickr photo pages there. You can even automate this using an RSS to Twitter service like Twitterfeed.
This isn’t going to be much fun for your readers. People tend to be interested in one or maybe two local libraries, not the whole service. An event on the other side of the borough probably doesn’t interest them, let alone hearing about new titles in stock or changes to opening times there. So people get deluged with information that they have to skip past to get to the 10% that matters to them. Some people will unsubscribe, feeling your services don’t provide good value for their time. Others will just feel a bit ambivalent skipping past the noise every time they read your feed. It’s not a great approach for them.
Social networks make it easy for people to mash feeds of content together but very hard for them to filter them. I can mash by simply choosing what I subscribe to. And filtering is the same thing — choosing what I don’t subscribe to. Most social media tools make it difficult or impossible to filter within a feed. So you have to do this on behalf of the people who might read what you write: separate your content into as many distinct and separate feeds as necessary. For a library service, this might mean creating separate feeds for each library and possibly ones for subject areas or children and teens too. This is more work for writers, and rightly so. Managing several accounts is harder than just one. But the onus is on us to do the legwork so our readers don’t have to plough through mountains of irrelevant content to get to the good stuff. The reward is that our readers will care more about what we write and consequently we’ll probably have more of them too.
The closely related topic of recycling identical content across several media or social networks is skilfully dissected at Unlink Your Feeds.
14 June 2010
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