Introduction

Having discussed laying the groundwork for marketing and promoting your library service, event or conference, let's next turn to some of the methods that you can use which should hopefully give you a good social media presence. This chapter is very practically based, using lots of different tools that you may find helpful when planning your marketing and promotion. Most of the tools will be free, though some may have a commercial aspect to them that you might want to explore if you have any extra cash available, but the emphasis here is really doing things on a shoestring budget.

Images

As we’ve seen before, using visual imagery is a great way to get people to sit up and take notice of what you’re doing. Unfortunately all too often we use the tools that are readily available to us, such as Microsoft Word clip art, which while it is convenient is not exactly very exciting. I would suggest that an excellent place to start, and to get some inspiration for posters, Facebook pictures, images that you can tweet about and so on is the BigHugeLabs website at http://bighugelabs.com. All that you need to start off with is an image; a photograph that you’ve got, an illustration from a library database, perhaps, a logo, or failing that an image that has a Creative Commons Licence that allows you to modify images that the original copyright owner is making freely available for this exact purpose. BigHugeLabs has drag-and-drop options allowing you to create magazine covers, movie posters, pop art posters, jigsaws or calendars. You can create photographic cubes that can be cut out and folded, create billboard-type images or wallpaper with monthly calendars for your computer.

To look at just two examples in detail: you can create your own badges, and Figure 9.1 is an example. You could then print these out, laminate them (cheap laminators can be purchased for about £10 these days) and then hand them out to library visitors. Instead of the image saying ‘Press’, you could edit it to become anything that you like; sculpture, artist, musician, writer, and so on, to focus on famous people in history.