Social media marketing is hard to avoid. This guide for librarians begins with a general discussion of what is available in the marketplace, and individual chapters go into detail on various options that are available for marketing library services, such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. The authors are practitioners from a range of American libraries with experience in using the social media platforms described in each chapter. They discuss their own uses of the technologies, as well as providing relevant case studies from other libraries.
Technologies discussed in individual chapters include Google+, QR codes, Pinterest, Foursquare and the use of wikis. The chapter on blogs gives sample selection criteria for choosing an appropriate blogging tool and suggests how to write blogs to create the required tone. The chapter on video-sharing sites, such as Vimeo and YouTube, assesses when video is a useful marketing tool and gives tips on creating effective videos. The Facebook chapter teaches how to set up an account, create pages, find followers and monitor use through statistics. Each chapter concludes with case studies, best practice ideas and conclusions.
The strength of the guide is its evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms, and the appropriateness of the technology in certain situations. It recognizes that there is no “one size fits all” result for libraries and that technology needs to be evaluated in terms of its suitability to meet individual needs. Potential difficulties are not glossed over; for example, there is consideration of copyright when using Pinterest for marketing. Authors rightly suggest that librarians develop a social media strategy before leaping into use of the technologies described in detail. Most of the references appear to be from 2012, and the authors acknowledge that the book is out of date from the time it is published and suggest using sites such as mashable.com to keep to date.
This guide is a useful starting point for librarians new to social media marketing and looking for an overview of what is available and what it can be used for. There are lots of ideas to inspire those new to marketing with social media, as well as providing guidance for more experienced users. The book is thus recommended to anyone interested in the topic which, given the relentless growth of social media marketing, must be almost all librarians today.
