Building Library Community Through Social Media

Zatko, Ruzena

Young, S. H., & Rossmann, D. (2015). Building library community through social media.

 

          Information Technology & Libraries, 34(1), 20-37 18p.

 

 

Summary:

 

          This article demonstrates how building a social media following and engagement with patrons is good for the library. Young and Rossman used Montana State University Library for this study to see the impact and benefit of a Twitter account for the library. For a library to have a social media presence, its able to reach a vast audience and build a community. Twitter keeps everyone in the loop and the patrons who are subscribed can be up to date with current happens at the library, surveys, book reviews, etc. The results concluded that the more the library posted, the more followers and interactions that were promoted. However, most of the engagement was kept on a local scale.

 

 

Evaluation:

 

          This article made some great points for a library to be trendy and create social media accounts for the library in order to reach even more people. Aside from businesses and other, libraries come in third with twitter activity followed by student accounts. Another observation from the article is the more tweets that were posted the more followers it generated. So keeping an active Twitter account it a vital component in order to gain a larger following.

          It would have been nice to see how Twitter is doing when compared to the other social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Another element that could be helpful is knowing the age demographics of the followers that they are generating. This in turn would allow them to know how to reach the demographics that are lower Twitter users. and this way create an approach for them for outreach and to keep them informed.