Social Marketing Sources: Pictures and Images for Libraries

I often post pictures and graphics to my Facebook that I personally find (in the context of libraries) interesting, funny, edifiying, or otherwise worthy of sharing.  Sometimes they even make it to my tweets or blog.  It sometimes happens that these things get a little more viral as librarians re-post them to their own personal pages or their library pages. That’s great since they often serve the purpose of helping library Facebook presences be a little more personal, dynamic, changing, and engaging.  I follow a lot of library folk primarily on their blogs and on Twitter and Facebook so I often get to see a lot of cool stuff about my passion, libraries and librarians.  You’re lucky I avoid sharing the political and satirical stuff I really find fascinating and humourous but that’s an aside (*grin).

I always wished there was a way to crowdsource all of these great pictures, posters and graphics for our community at large so that the folks who have responsibility for their library’s social media editorial can source a lot more things and make choices of what might meet their communities’ needs as well as fit their organizations’ social media strategies.

Wishes Answered!

Ben Bizzle, whom I met this year at Internet Librarian and cool guy at Joneboro Public Library, has created this Dropbox group:

Library Facebook Images

It’s an open group for you to get images and to share your’s with other library folk.  If you want an invite to the group, just send me your e-mail address and I’ll send you an invite.

If you want to see more of Ben’s work, check out his blog:

http://www.benbizzle.com/category/library/

I liked this particular post wth 5 good pieces of advice for library Facebookers:

Facebook After Hours

http://www.benbizzle.com/facebook-after-hours/

Other sources that come to mind are:

Tumblr Libraries

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/libraries

Tumblr Librarian

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/librarian

Pinterest has a bunch of library and librarian themed boards.  You know how to search. http://pinterest.com

Flickr is an old dowager of a standby: again just use the search function http://www.flickr.com

The Instagram App can be a good real time tool for mobile events.

And, of course there’s the old standbys: Google Images, Yahoo Images and Bing Images, among others with CC licensed works too, where you can create and share your own creations.

It’s relatively easy to increase engagement on your social media sites for your library this way – every day or more – while being fun and interesting too.

Following a few will help increase your pool of content and access the hivemind of your peers.

Stephen