Ramblings: Failed Goals

Failed Goal: Social Media For My School Library Over the Holiday Break

Have you ever fallen short of a goal you have set for yourself? I know have. Many, many times. Just recently, I set for myself a goal of increasing engagement on our school library social media account. I started using Reels and Stories and posting more often. I used a scheduling tool to post on the days I wasn’t working and to ensure we had a consistent presence. And it worked. We increased our followers over the term by 26 and increased accounts reached by 5745% to over 47,000 accounts and 3229 content interactions.

So where does the failed goal come in? I was determined to continue this over the school holidays. That’s the time the students are most likely to be scrolling on Instagram, right? It makes sense for the Library to be active then, sharing tips on how to access ebooks and promoting holiday reading. I’d even lined up a connection with the local public library so that I could share their holiday programs and collections. But. Instead, I did nothing. Nada. Not a thing. I didn’t post once on our school library account over the two week period.

I made one initial mistake – I didn’t schedule my posts.

The end of the term was super busy (no surprise there) so I didn’t have time to do my regular weekly/fortnightly creating of posts and scheduling. I could have set aside just 30 minutes at the start of the holidays to do this, but I didn’t. Without this, when it came to it, I just didn’t get around to posting. And then, once the first week was done and I did have time, I gave the silly excuse of, oh I didn’t post during the first week, I can’t start now. What even? Now, as I am writing this, it’s the last Sunday before we start back at school and not only have I not posted anything for the last two weeks, I have not scheduled anything for the next few weeks. Fortunately, we only lost 2 followers, and we still managed to reach over 1000 accounts (thanks again to our Reels which continue in popularity) but our interaction stats are down by 93%. No shocker there. They are just numbers. And at the end of the day they don’t mean much. What I am most disappointed in myself about is that I missed the opportunity to put something positive and reading focused in our students’ feeds this holiday break.

So. New goal.

My aim is to continue to increase the regularity of our Instagram posts for Term 4 and into and over the Summer holidays. To schedule further in advance, so that even if I don’t get around to a weekly or fortnightly scheduling, there will be some posts that still pop up in the students’ feeds. I also want to compare our engagement statistics and follower counts compared to this holiday (when I didn’t post anything) to the coming summer holiday period (where I will post, I will, I will make sure I will!!). That way I can prove how effective holiday posting is (or isn’t) and further prove to myself how important it is to set aside just a few minutes to ensure we have a constant sharing of posts, giving myself further incentive to continue doing it.

So, instead of beating myself up about not posting and not meeting my goal, I’m going to take it as a positive and a selection of data I otherwise wouldn’t have.

How about you? Do you have social media accounts for your school library? Do you post during the holiday breaks?