Characterizing university library use of social media: a case study of twitter and facebook from Australia

The work presented here characterise the engagement of one university library with two social media platforms popular with academic libraries. The collected data are analysed to identify the forms of Twitter and Facebook activity that engage library stakeholders in social media conversations. Associations were observed between: i) directed tweets from the library and mentions of the library by others on Twitter; and ii) comments from the library and comments from others on Facebook. Three broad classes of Twitter user interacting with the library were revealed: i) accounts strongly linked to the library with multiple to/from tweets; ii) those weakly linked to the library with, typically, a single tweet; and iii) those indirectly linked to the library through tweets mentioning the library and sent by other users. Two divergent forms of Facebook interaction with the library were highlighted: i) a library post generating a large sequence of comments, typically in response to a competition/challenge and ii) a library post with no comments, typically a photo post or a post inviting readers to click a link to find out more about an event/service. The work presented here is an initial investigation that provides useful insights, and offers a methodology for future research.