One hundred tweets from library land: A case study of RMIT University Library (academic library) and State Library of Victoria (public state library) in Australia

Abstract

Twitter is used by different library types to communicate and engage with their community. This case study focuses on content choices in tweets and the level of engagement generated, in the context of two different types of library. The current study attempts to examine the contents of Library Twitter account of two libraries (academic and public) with the aim of evaluating in a comparative mode, their themes and levels of user engagement. This research used a mixed method research approach. For quantitative approach, this study analyzed 100 Tweets from each library, i.e. RMIT University Library and State Library of Victoria. Also, the study analyzed a number of tweets and levels of engagement by recording numbers of likes, replies and retweets. The qualitative aspect analyzed each Tweet to determine engagement level and type of content shared by each library. The results demonstrate that the public and academic libraries publish different types of content. The varied nature, audience and mandate of each library appear to influence the focus of their tweets. Also, the results show that the level of engagement is a factor of the numbers of tweets in any theme. The limitation of this study is the data set contained only 100 tweets for each library. Moreover, the number of users and registered library accounts had probably increased since the study was conducted.

COVID-19 and library social media use

“…As the type of posts is more crucial than the number of posts for attracting users' attention (Smeaton and Davis, 2014), participants were asked to demonstrate the content of their library's posts. Results (Table 7)in line with prior studies (Alsuhaibani, 2020;Bacon, 2017;Joo et al, 2018;Mahmood and Richardson, 2011;Taylor and Francis Group, 2014) revealed that libraries mainly use social media for communicating general announcements regarding library operations (88.1%), information about library events (85.8%) and event photos or videos (82.1%), as well as for promoting their services (80.6%). Librarians are also concerned about their communities' interests (58.2%), whereas news and/or information about Library and Information Science (25.4%) are shared to a smaller extent.…”

“…and posts about collection (new arrivals) and events. By contrast, tweets of an academic and a public library in Australiarelated to services, events and collection promotionreceived more user engagement than the other types of tweets (Alsuhaibani, 2020). The aforementioned study also revealed that the content of tweets of the two libraries were different, customized to address different audiences.…”

“…The aforementioned study also revealed that the content of tweets of the two libraries were different, customized to address different audiences. In general, content covering upcoming events (Alsuhaibani, 2020;Joo et al, 2018), library services (Mahmood and Richardson, 2011;Zhang et al, 2018) and library news (Mahmood and Richardson, 2011) is the most frequently generated by libraries.…”

Using Marketing Technologies to Increase User Engagement on Library’s Social Media Pages

“…За последние десятилетия интернет прочно закрепился как средство коммуникации, получения новостей и развлечения 1 (Ринчинова, 2020). При этом значительная доля коммуникативных и развлекательных процессов приходится на социальные сети, представляющие из себя: 1) платформу, на которой частные лица и организации могут строить социальные отношения между единомышленниками, разделяющими одни и те же интересы или цели, деятельность и личные дела (Umaru, Omame, 2020); 2) любое количество технологических систем, связанных с сотрудничеством, сообществом, взаимодействием, а также созданием и обменом контентом в реальном времени (Reham, 2020). Таким образом, можно говорить о том, что социальные сети -это новый набор технологических инструментов, позволяющих осу-1 Жизнь онлайн: потребление, пользование, развлечения : аналитический обзор // ВЦИОМ.…”

@Digital libraries: harnessing Twitter to build online communities

“…However, most of these studies only illuminated physical library Twitter use. There is a difference in how Twitter is used in different types of library settings (Alsuhaibani, 2018). Despite DLs growing in the past decade, they were often not a part of the overarching Twitter library and information science research.…”