“They retweeted me once - it was quite exciting!”

Using Twitter in Information Services

By Joanne Casey, Senior Content Producer

In September 2009, I was leading a small communications team for IT Services, and I'd had my own Twitter account for 9 months. As a team we were reviewing our approach to communication and saw that other university services were starting to use Twitter, so we decided to create an account for IT Services. We saw it as a new way to keep people informed of new services, alert them to any downtime, and raise awareness of security issues - phishing attacks and the like. We seethed inwardly when an occasional colleague gleefully dismissed Twitter to our customers, even as we tried to promote it (“I'd never use that”), and eventually we seethed outwardly too, which seemed to put a stop to it…

Managing Twitter

In 2011, the Library, Archives, and IT Services converged to become Information Services, and my communications team gained an extra member and became the Communications and Marketing team for all three services. The Library also had a Twitter feed, which had been operating since September 2010. At this point the Library had limited resource available for marketing activities, so the account was run by a group of interested people from different teams. This didn't always work well - with no defined responsibility for the account, some queries went unanswered, and the posting rates on the account varied hugely from day to day. As part of a review of relationship management activities, responsibility for the Library twitter feed was passed to us in the Communications and Marketing team, leaving us with two Twitter feeds to play with.

(As an aside, it's worth noting that this semi-outsourced style of working may not have been the best choice for our Twitter feed, but can be very effective in other contexts, so shouldn't be dismissed; our Instagram account is populated by eager photographers from different Library groups, and as such offers a broader picture - pun intended - of our resources.)

Fairly naturally, we fell into different voices for the two accounts; what we had to say on the IT account (downtimes, phishing alerts, new services) wasn't as easy to have fun with as the more varied topics on the Library account. Inevitably, we often retweeted from the 'other' account, and yes, we started talking to ourselves…

In the early days, we took a fairly concerted approach to building followers; we announced the Twitter feeds in newsletters, news items on our websites, and via the student union newsletter - the latter was especially successful. We added our Twitter name to printed materials, and included it in our email signatures, and colleagues were encouraged to do the same. Nowadays, people expect us to have Twitter so we don't have to work so hard at promoting it. Our focus is very much on user engagement, and we try to respond to all tweets, including negative ones; it's an opportunity to improve someone's experience, and turn around their perception of our service. When we engage with our users, whether it's with a well-chosen gif, a light-hearted reply, or supplying exactly the right information, we get more interaction which in turn helps to build our following. Any tweets with a feedback element are favourited and pulled into our monthly feedback report.

In 2014, the Library Twitter feed was nominated for an award from our Student Union, and were awarded Highly Commended in the Unsung Heroes of Non-Academic Staff category. Nominations were made by two of our student followers, who commented on the speed and humour of our responses, with one of them adding “they retweeted me once and it was quite exciting”. It was a very proud moment, with the added joy of champagne at the award ceremony.

Just an extension of the help desk? 

We were clear from the offset, that we wouldn't be the digital wing of the IT Support Office or the Library help Desk. Our Twitter bios explain that we offer 'news and updates'. However, while it's easy to set your own parameters and guidelines for how the Twitter account will be used, but not so easy to persuade your followers to work within them. And that's understandable - if my supermarket make an error with my delivery, then tweeting them is quick and easy, and the same is true for anyone with a question or comment for us. In addition, Twitter acts as an early warning system; this is easiest to see with the IT feed where users alerting us to issues with wifi can be as quick as our own alerts, but it's there on the Library account too, letting us gauge the thermostat, both actual (“It's too hot in Fairhurst”) and metaphorical (“Why are there so many A level students in the Library? We need seats!”).

Knowing its value

One way and another, we spend quite a bit of time working on our social media, and it's a key part of our communication approach, so it's important to evaluate its success. We use Twitter analytics, to assess engagements and impressions, and we use Google analytics to examine the traffic to our websites. But on a day to day basis, just getting a feel for it works pretty well too.

Learning from others

We didn't know when we set up these accounts how they would develop.Twitter is all about sharing and learning; we've learnt from those around us, and grown in response to our followers. We follow and retweet other accounts in the University and the city, and we also follow lots of library accounts - they're often funny and interesting (and we can steal their good ideas). Particular favourites are Liverpool Uni Library and Warwick Uni Library and, like everyone else, we have just a hint of a crush on the Orkney Library Twitter account.

How do students really prefer to communicate, and what should we do about it? Part 1: Email

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

Tweet 

At the University of York there are audits every few years around student communication. They're conducted centrally by the University, rather than being library-specific. The most recent one was shared with the Library Marketing and Comms Group by York's Internal Communications Manager, and she's kindly given me permission to share the findings here because I think they're absolutely fascinating. They challenge some conventional wisdom, and reveal a lot.

There was a lot about email so this post is devoted to that area; there'll be a part 2 later in the week which covers social media, lecture capture, the VLE and other types of comms.

It's important to note the information was gleaned through focus groups rather than surveys in order to properly capture nuance, so it's not a giant sample size (under 100 people) and inevitably the views reflected will be representative of students engaged enough to turn up for a focus group... But personally I find the findings more useful than generic articles in the Higher Ed press about students of today.

Throughout this article I'll be using phrases like "Students prefer to do X" - the obvious caveat is that I mean "Students at York do X" but I'm not going to write that every time...

How do students communicate? The main findings around email 

1) Email remains the primary and preferred channel of communication with the University

I like this one because it confirms something I've thought for a while - that email is NOT dead. It gets a bad press and it's definitely far less cool than social media, but it still has a function. It's not that students especially love email, it's that they want US - the University and its key services - to communicate key info this way. 

2) Email mainly gets checked on phones, and this happens very frequently

Students check email primarily on their phones, sometimes moving on to a PC / laptop later (see point 3 below). 

Students check their phones for emails first thing when they wake up, last thing at night, and several times in between - many students have 'new message' alerts set up to go to their lock-screens, and will check new emails as they come in even whilst doing other things such as attending lectures.

3) Students triage messages according to 5 criteria 

Students make quick decisions on whether an email gets read there and then, binned, or deferred. They consider (in order of importance):

Relevance - title, sender, and the opening part of the message visible on their phone before they press to open the message; 

Familiarity - do they know and trust the person sending the email? Trusted senders include tutors, supervisors, departmental administrators, the Library, Careers Service, and Timetabling; 

Urgency - does it relate to something important that day or a pending deadline; 

Action - do they need to do something?  (Notice this is 4th on the list of importance...) Interestingly if they do need to do something they'll star the email and find a PC or laptop to log onto and action the email;

Time - if it looks like it can be dealt with quickly they'll read it right away and then delete, file or just mark as read. 

4) The high volume of email they receive is okay, on one condition... it MUST be targeted

Students get a huge volume of emails but they don't mind this as long as the emails are targeted. They object to irrelevant emails and perhaps more so to emails that appear to be relevant but turn out not to be - one example given was an invitation to an employers' event for the wrong subject area or year / status. The sender of that email lost the trust of the students and future emails were deleted upon arrival, unread. 

Any sense of emails happening automatically or without proper thought as to their relevance was met with dissatisfaction. A particular type of email came at the same time each day, suggesting it was automated - this too became one to delete automatically. 

Newsletters and digest emails were read, but often only the first part (too much scrolling and the email was abandoned) and these are the first to go - to be deleted unread - when there's a day with an overly high volume of emails. 

What can libraries change about the way we email students? 

The first thing is don't give up on email. Students expect communication from us to be via this medium, and it was strongly expressed that important information should come this way - key info can be shared via social media but must ALSO be shared via email because it's the one channel everyone checks. The reports of email's death have been greatly exaggerated. 

The second thing is, small details - like titles - really matter. The Library appears to be on the list of trusted senders, but in order to get read you need a decent subject line. (This didn't come up in the audit but I'd argue time of day is important too - if students get a truck load of emails between 9am and 10am, it may be better to join a shorter queue for their attention later in the day at 11am.) Also, because students primarily read email on their phone, you need a very strong opening line. Open your email client on your phone right now - how much can you read without opening a specific email? The way my phone is set-up I get to see about 40 words. So your first few words need to go straight to the heart of the matter - no long intros.

This is obvious, right? We all check emails ourselves on mobiles, we know what it's like. But how many times do we craft emails specifically with the receiver on their phone in mind? I can't speak for anyone else but in my case the answer is: not nearly often enough. 

Thirdly, segment your audience and target them with relevant emails - never include a group in a mass email unless they are directly relevant and would benefit from the info. If an email isn't essential to anyone, does it even need to be sent at all? There are too many emails that are sent out not just to the relevant people but to a smattering of less relevant people too. Every time we do that we diminish our value as communicators - our currency - and get closer to joining the dreaded auto-delete list. 

And related to that, reduce automation because it suggests we're not trying hard enough to avoid wasting their time. It's very hard to think carefully whether or not to send an email if it's automated. I've always said we shouldn't send newsletters out at the same time each week or month - it should be because we have a critical mass of useful things to tell our audience, not because 'it's the time we send out the newsletter'. So anything automated should at least be reviewed to make sure it's still serving a worthwhile purpose and not alienating our users. 

In Part 2 of this post we'll look at the (surprising?) popularity of the VLE, the love-affair with lecture capture, and where social media fits in with formal communication.