Building Library Community Through Social Media

Rowland, Sarah

Young, S. s., & Rossmann, D. d. (2015). Building Library Community Through Social Media. Information Technology & Libraries, 34(1), 20-37.

Summary: This paper follows an academic libraries attempt at changing the way they handle Twitter by bringing a more “intentional, personality-rich, and interaction-driven approach to its social media activity” (p. 20). It gives a nice literature review talking about where libraries currently stand on social media and how the conversation so far has been pretty disjointed and not very useful. It also discusses how a majority of libraries use social media for marketing, announcements or promotional material instead of developing an online community. They evaluated Montana State University’s current Twitter activity to gauge user type, action-object mapping and interaction of the followers of the libraries account. They determined by changing the type of tweets they increased the number of students who follow the libraries Twitter account went from 6% to 28%. This was just from Phase 1 to Phase 2. Over the course of one year by using more personality-rich two way interacting their community of students grew by 366 percent and their interaction grew by 275 percent. From this research it was concluded that, “Our research demonstrates the value of social media as a community-building tool, and our model can guide social media in libraries toward this purpose” (p. 32).

Evaluation: This was an excellent study and article that was done. If you are interested in how to increase student usage of social media for your libraries account I think this article gives a great overview. It really showed that moving away from the one way communication that most libraries use social media for that one could build an online library community that students will use.