Media monitoring -- State Library of Queensland

I've followed the State Library of Queensland's tweets and Facebook posts for the past year and what's stuck out at me is how much insight they have into using social media to engage. Now granted, I do have some idea as to what happens behind the scenes, as I did an internship in their marketing department for a month back in 2012, in their transition to their new All Yours tagline, and complete restructuring of site design and image, but even then, I didn't expect a change so rapid and uplifting.

Before this time, the State Library of Queensland seemed like every other run-of-the-mill library's limp attempt at social media. They'd rarely engage, and when they did, it would be auto-updates of events, and with social media hidden (if used at all) in the online landscape of their pages. Now however, with the reinvention soon after the establishment of The Edge department, they have both a Twitter and Facebook, and the same for The Edge. And they make avid use of their collections, deviating from the standard 'here is an event -- book now'-style cop-outs being given by so many organisations that miss the point of social media -- engagement of the audience.

The State Library grabs photos out of their collections and posts them on Facebook and Twitter, inviting users to guess the locations and events shown, or taps into current events and posts something historically relevant. In one of their best decisions (and a project I loved doing at my time there), the State Library of Queensland joined Historypin and have their collections uploaded with geo-mapping on the Google Maps infrastructure.

The State Library of Queensland are on Flickr, and allow use of their collections online to save users needing to go to the library itself to find images for personal discovery or use. With the photos being uploaded to Twitter, State Library of Queensland have also tried to get engagement going through hashtags. The most recent, #thisisqueensland, tapping into an ongoing discussion of different photos that represent our state, is proving to have much traction.

I attended an event called "Makerspaces" (discussed elsewhere in this blog) and SLQ were tweeting about it, and in addition, SLQ employees were joining in discussion on their own Twitter accounts. I followed a few, and participated in discussion, and they responded to my tweets, without me directly mentioning them. This shows that even the employees themselves 'get' social media, and are willing to engage outside of the standard and 'official' accounts.

The State Library of Queensland has proved to be a leading library organisation in the use of social media in Australia. Its integration of both Facebook and Twitter as core outlets for giving users access to its collection is an example that should be taken up by any library wanting to be forward thinking and looking for ways to be a part of the digital future.