Elspeth Clarke, Reader Services Supervisor

Earlier this year, I was given the opportunity to take leadership of the Library Marketing Group. This was a great chance for me to not only become more involved in the general marketing that goes in the library, such as advertising events, promoting our services and creating flyers for Welcome Week, but it also meant I had the chance to come up with some fun and creative ways to engage with users via Social Media, in this case Twitter.

Since becoming the Chair of the Marketing group I have been involved in two campaigns that we have run. The first was based around World Book Day in March. As part of this, we decided that we wanted to tweet throughout the day about different books that had either inspired library staff or Goldsmiths students, or their favourite childhood books. This was done through staff contributing their books to a shared document, along with a short quote to why they love the book or the impact it had on them.

We also collected student’s favourite or influential books by posing the questions on the whiteboards near the entrance to the library, and waiting to see what they shared. Many of the books were part of our collection, so we took photos of the ones we had, and found images of the covers online for those we didn’t. These were then all compiled, and every book that was shared with us was then given it’s own tweet throughout the day. We also included the call number of the books if we had them in our collection, to make it easier for people to find them if inspiration struck and they wanted to read any of the books.

Another campaign that was incredibly fun to run was one we did for National Pet Month in April. This was slightly more challenging due to the lock-down, as it all had to be done via email and online calls. It also meant that we weren’t able to reach out to students in the usual ways about their pets. However, we did get a lot of photos back from staff that we gladly accepted and used to create our National Pet Month tweets. As we had a whole month, we did a tweet a day to highlight different pets and included a little story or personality trait with each tweet. This was a great way to share a bit of ourselves with other Goldsmiths staff and students as well as other University Library staff who follow our Twitter account. It was also a great way for us to get to know a bit more about some of our colleagues and get to look at cute photos of animals.

We were also able to use the photos we got in a creative and fun way on our temporary, dedicated COVID-19 Libguide by creating a section called Meet the New Co-workers! where you can scroll through a slideshow of staff pets (and a plant or two!) that are keeping library staff company while they work from home.