Welcome to the Library: Building a Social Orientation Campaign

Online orientation activities provide an alternative means of reaching out to new and returning students who may not be likely to attend an orientation event sponsored by the library. This chapter outlines one approach to creating a social orientation campaign in which an academic library works to share library information and be an active participant in the social conversation on campus. I outline some of the goals we set for the social campaign, the social strategies used, and the ways of assessing social engagement with library content. This approach may be used by academic libraries of any type that are able to dedicate the staff time to surveying the campus social scene and using that knowledge to build a campaign that meets the needs of the unique community.