Twitter
RSSIt all started with a short comment on a blog post and resulted in a great worldwide twitter event: the follow-a-library day on October 1st. We loved organising it and learned a lot about libraries, librarians, patrons and the role that social media can play in bringing them together.
Our main goal was to put libraries and their great work in the spotlight on Twitter. We were hoping that the positive online attention would increase the number of followers for libraries. It is very hard to determine the success rate of this objective. The only feasible way to achieve this would be to ask every individual library that was mentioned in a #followalibrary tweet on October 1st, how many followers they gained on that day. But a lot more happened on that day than we anticipated.
The results
Overall more than 7000 tweets were made. We found 12 inspiring videos on YouTube from librarians about the day that attracted a 1000 views in a short time span. Our seven promotion films on YouTube attracted 3000 views. A lot of blogs worldwide paid attention to the subject. All impressive numbers that reached far above our expectations. But just as remarkable were the tweets that we read that day and afterwards.
It was fascinating to read what impact libraries have on peoples lives. And they were not only talking about the twittering ones. Besides patrons finding new twittering libraries, librarians also met each other that day. We saw quite a number of tweets of the new connections that were formed. Finally libraries were promoting each other. This meant to us that it wasn’t just about individual organisations looking for online promotion. It was about forming a united front to emphasise the importance and impact libraries have on peoples lives and society.
Thank you
We want to give a big big big thank you to everybody that joined in on October 1st. The great tweets, videos en blog posts, fantastic photos of the QR-poster and other pictures of promotional activities. We loved all the creativity of our worldwide colleagues.
A special thanks to Michael Stephens, David Lee King and Stephen Abram for participating in the videos and their promotion activities. Also the Wang Library, Mylee Joseph and the followanarchive crew for their input.
Next worldwide library events
- On November 12 it is #followanarchive day on twitter
- Cycling for libraries
- How about #followalibrary 2011? Does anyone want to organise it next year? You won’t get any money, but the reward is so much bigger than that :-) If so, you can contact us via email, twitter or a comment on this post.
Anything to share?
If you can tell us how many new followers your library gained on or after October 1st, if you have written a blog post about #followalibrary or if there is anything else you want to share about your #followalibrary experiences, please post a comment here!
It would be great to hear from you!
The followalibrary crew 2010
Poulus Bliek, Wilma van den Brink, Lukas Koster, Edwin Mijnsbergen, Ad Aerts, Harriet de Man
