At Transparent Language, we know social media. We’ve grown our social following to over 3 million fans, and were among the top 1% viewed accounts on SlideShare for 2013. Growing our following has been easy, because we genuinely love and serve our language communities.

There’s another institution that loves and serves its community: libraries. We talk to librarians whenever we can, attending library conferences such as ALA and PLA, hosting webinars, reaching out on phone calls, and even visiting in-person when possible. But the subject of these conversations isn’t always our own product, Transparent Language Online for Libraries. A topic that comes up frequently is social media. Many librarians struggle to promote the many products and services that they offer to their patrons.

Social media should be a shoo-in for libraries. Many organizations struggle to provide valuable content to their followers, frequently reducing their social efforts to just another advertising channel. This happens because to these organizations, followers represent potential sales more than they do a community. That’s not a problem for libraries; they’re all about great free resources, events, and services for the community! And yet, we read articles about how social media is often not proving as fruitful an endeavor for libraries as one might expect.

So we decided to help, to share what’s worked for us, and to make recommendations about how libraries could implement the same strategies to make their social media efforts more effective. We did what any good social media marketers would do; we wrote an eBook.

Download Making Social Media Work for Your Library. It’s free, of course, and we hope it helps you leverage social media’s powers for good! If you have any feedback or suggestions, or notice something we didn’t cover that could make this guide better for you, please let us know. We’re in this together.