Article Note: Facebook, Instagram, and Academic Library User Engagement

Citation for the article: 

 

Tammy Tim Wai Chan, et.al., "From Facebook to Instagram: Exploring User Engagement in an Academic Library." Journal of Academic Librarianship 46 (2020): 1-8.

The article looks at academic library use of Facebook and Instagram and how effective or not they are in engaging library patrons. Instagram has been picking up traction as social media users show a strong preference for photo apps and viewing images over text. The authors analyzed posts and usage from Facebook and Instagram plus they got student feedback from interviews on campus to do the social media evaluation. The study took place at University of Hong Kong Libraries, so keep that in mind when reading this as some things that apply over there may or not apply in the United States. Still, I think there are some lessons that can be learned. The authors hope that this study helps other librarians do similar evaluation efforts in their institutions as well as help them craft better social media policies. 

The research period of the study was from January to May 2019, a semester. They interviewed 8 students, graduate and undergraduate, for the feedback gathering stage.

Some article takeaways for me: 

• The authors cite a study indicating that Facebook was the most popular social media platform in Hong Kong, but they also found that user engagement with the library's Facebook page was low. I found that interesting because our library's Facebook page does get a good amount of engagement at least in terms of views and a few comments. It is enough that our library wants to keep using it even with Facebook's known issues regarding things like user privacy (but that is another conversation). Our campus students are very active in Facebook groups, and we often share library FB posts on student groups.
  
• They have a social media team: "Three library staff from the Public Relations and Development team, who are a manager, a graphic designer, and a student helper, respectively, are responsible for handling the matters of both Facebook and Instagram channels, such as content management, reporting, and publicity creation" (1). Granted, we are a much smaller campus, but we can barely get a student worker to do the social media consistently, and as for the librarians, it is often done when we remember to do it or something important needs to be shared. To be honest, I wish we were more mindful about library social media, but the usual issues of time and priorities seem to come up often. This also brings up another point the article makes and that is that we could and should improve content to other material besides operational announcements. We currently do some additional things on Facebook, but not enough in my humble opinion. 
• This also highlights another issue the article brings up: "The librarian's inadequate knowledge and lack of training about the use of SM, and limited support and resources from the institutions were some of the major obstacles to the success of libraries' SM" (2). I know that what I know about social media has been mostly self taught including a lot of reading as well as practice and trial and error. These things were not really taught in library school in my time. Now we do get LIS school graduates who get some degree of training in social media, and other online technologies such as podcasting; in fact, we recently hired a "Digital Initiatives Librarian" just for that kind of thing. However,  the emphasis on that is use of digital tools and online research; it is mainly for digital scholarship, which by the way is a glamorous trend now (much like Library 2.0 was back some years ago). The Digital Initiatives are great, but social media does not fall under this purview (again, another conversation). At any rate, outside of library school, institutional support for social media use, training, and policies is usually lacking. 
• This also highlights the issue of workload when it comes to social media, which library administrators often fail to recognize. They like when the social media works well and makes the library look good but rarely do they credit the work that goes into making it happen. Heck, back in Hong Kong, it was the students interviewed who were thoughtful about librarians' workloads: "All the interviewees expressed concern about the increasing workload of HKUL staff to manage the SM sites, as they believed lots of efforts, time, and skills should be needed" (5). Certainly more thoughtful than here in the United States.
  
• The authors cite research that observes that academic libraries tend to use social media for disseminating information, marketing, publicity, and answering inquiries. Marketing seems to be most successful use. 
• When it comes to Facebook versus Instagram, they found Instagram got more engagement of the two. 
• Authors list the categories they coded the posts in. I am noting them in part because some of these could be ideas for content additions here. For us, we do some of this, but some consistency is where we really need the work. See Table 2 in the article: 
• Library news dissemination
• General library operation
• Recruitment (i.e. hiring. Job advertisements)
• Marketing library events (we do some of these already, a bit less so now due to COVID-19, but we have managed to also do some virtual events)
• Library facilities (for example for us here, items about the St. John's Bible)
• Library in-house collections (we do some of this in form of reference book of the week and graphic novel of the week highlights. This content could be expanded, say a review now and then)
• Other services
• Publications (this can be highlights of campus publications for example. We do some of this with the faculty publications display but not really pushed as much on social media)
• Information or knowledge sharing or other events (like monthly observances, we do some of that here)
• Information acquisition suggestions
•  Why is good social media content important? "They observed that the majority of posts were about the information of library general operation and library events, which were useful. However, they felt that an SM site full of these uninteresting posts would be very dull and unattractive" (5). And yes, posts with pictures of cute animals do remain popular. 
• Users do expect entertaining and interesting content, so things like memes, humor, greeting, are appreciated and desired (7). 
• "Scholars further explain that academic libraries should have a formal policy that defines the market strategy and communication tone on SM sites, and designate a team to manage the SM sites" (7). And yes, this also has the usual CYA angle.