Many libraries jumped on the social media bandwagon, creating blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and more. But is it garnering the hoped-for kind of patron/student engagement?
From the current issue of D-Lib:
Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users’ Comments
Michalis Gerolimos
Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece
mike@ionio.gr
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This paper examines users’ comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of “likes” and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the “like” functionality and most comments on academic libraries’ Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.
While there is always value in librarians having a place to know what is happening in other areas of the library, and it is possible that others are reading the posts but just not commenting on announcements, these results point to the possibility that the anticipated outreach is actually a turn inward.
The paper doesn’t hide Gerolimos’ opinion that early reports on the impact of social media and libraries were on the Utopian end of the spectrum.
See also the Annoyed Librarian.