1. A white paper from Taylor & Francis
Use of social media by the library: current practices and future opportunities
A white paper from Taylor & Francis
Introduce ourselves first, with Kim to lead into presentation…
Social media has the potential to facilitate much closer relationships between libraries. The use of social media tools is rapidly accelerating and they are likely to play an increasingly important role in library service provision in the future.
Taylor & Francis has undertaken the research and compilation of this white paper to provide an overview of current practices from which individual institutions can benchmark their own activities and be inspired to try new approaches.

2. Methodology Focus groups in the UK, USA & India
10 telephone interviews
Twitter party
Online survey
Desk research
Kim
Our research program for this white paper was international in scope and conducted through a number of channels. The research comprised:
Focus groups with librarians in the UK, USA and India
10 telephone interviews with thought leaders from the library community
A Twitter party, with participants from UK, USA, Australia, Canada, and South Africa
An online survey, which received 497 responses
Follow-up desk research to reference other relevant studies

3. To benchmark how social media tools are currently being used in the library in a constantly evolving digital and social climate
To prepare for the future role social media will play in a library and scholarly communication environment
To inspire new approaches and share ideas on Social Media by creating and facilitating dialogue between our library partners
Nerida
So… why did we do it?

4. Focus Groups
Kim
We hosted focus groups in the UK, US and India. The UK and US groups were facilitated by librarians. The Indian Group, by T&F Staff.
The feedback we had from our focus groups points to similarities between the US and UK in how and to what extent Social Media is being used in the library, and to differences between these countries and India, where there is a lot of interest in the potential of Social Media as a communications tool in the library, but less current practical use.

5. In-depth interviews
Conducted with 10 experts in using Social Media in the library
Interviewees came from US, Canada, UK and Switzerland
Job roles include E-Learning Technologist, Community Engagement Librarian, User Experience Librarian, and Head of Library Planning and Administration
Nerida
We used the in-depth interviews to gain an understanding about how librarians were using social media on a day-to-day basis, what challenges they found, and in some cases, to see how they were collaborating with librarians at other universities. Much of the feedback from this part of our research has allowed us to develop a number of case studies.

6. A Twitter party?
Kim
We hosted a Twitter party with 73 registrants. This was an hour-long lively and engaging discussion via Twitter, which elicited 260 mentions*. We invited guests to our party via and twitter, and sent registrants a list of themes that we then covered during the course of the hour which included:
USING SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS IN YOUR LIBRARY
TRENDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE LIBRARY COMMUNITY
SOCIAL MEDIA AS A TEACHING TOOL – THE ROLE SM PLAYS IN INFORMATION LITERACY
ACCESSIBILITY
USER ENGAGEMENT & PERCEPTION OF YOUR USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE LIBRARY
MEASURABILITY – THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
We used the conversation from the party to create a ‘storify’ to share the findings. In just one week, there were 1,150 views as well as enquiries on how to participate in our research from several universities in Europe and South Asia.

7. Who responded to our survey?
Nerida

8. By country
Country
Respondents
Percentages
United States
182
56.0%
Chile 1
0.3%
United Kingdom 50
15.4%
Finland
India 12
3.7%
Germany
Australia 7
2.2%
Ghana
Ireland 6
1.8%
Hong Kong
South Africa 5
1.5%
Indonesia
Spain 4
1.2%
Israel
Brazil 3
0.9%
Jamaica
Canada
Japan
Malaysia
Lebanon
New Zealand
Lithuania
Philippines
Moldova
Switzerland
Nigeria
Czech Republic 2
0.6%
Norway
France
Poland
Greece
Puerto Rico
Hungary
Singapore
Italy
Slovenia
Netherlands
Sri Lanka
Pakistan
Sweden
Portugal
Turkey
Argentina
Vietnam
Bahamas
Zimbabwe
Nerida
There were 497 responses to the online survey in total, with by far the majority coming from the US, followed by the UK, and then India and Australia. This didn’t give us enough of a representative sample to draw conclusions about different approaches to Social Media on a per country basis, but the qualitative feedback we had from our focus groups points to similarities between the US and UK in how and to what extent Social Media is being used in the library, and to differences between these countries and India, where there is a lot of interest in the potential of Social Media as a communications tool in the library, but less practical use.

9. By institution type Nerida
The majority of responses came from librarians working in Academic libraries, with some small representation from libraries in other sectors, including public and professional.

10. By job role
Nerida
We asked librarians to identify their job title to see if there were conclusions we could draw about how they were using social media depending on their role in the library. We then grouped the 32 different job titles into the 6 categories above. There were in actual fact very few correlations between a given role and an individual or library’s approach to Social Media, but interestingly we are seeing the creation of new roles in the library dedicated to communications and social media. 10 respondents identified themselves as a Social Media Manager; 7 as an Outreach or Communications Librarian, and 1 as Head of Marketing.

11. By audience size Nerida
The majority of respondents were noted as working in libraries with fewer than 5k FTEs, although a sizeable minority were using Social Media to within communities of 25k+ FTEs. We haven’t yet had time to analyse whether the potential audience size changes how and why a given library uses Social Media.
This gives you some idea of how we collected the research to inform our White Paper, along with an overview of who informed this research. We’ll now take you through some of the key findings.

12. How are libraries currently using social media?
Kim

13. Setting the scene: current use
67% manage between 1 – 4 social media accounts
30% post on at least a daily basis
44% have 3 or more people looking after social media accounts for the library
“The pros of social media policy are that they remind us that we are posting as the institution, not the individual”
Kim
Taking data from the survey, the following statistics give us a profile of current use of social media in the library.
Over 70% of librarians feel that use of social media is important
Most libraries (67%) manage between one and four social media accounts
30% post to social media daily
44% of respondents have 3 or more people looking after social media for the library
Over 60% have had a social media account for over 3 years
Facebook and Twitter remain the most popular channels, followed closely by blogs
Approaches to policy implementation are split. 29% have a social media policy in place, and 28% are planning to implement one. However, 43% of survey respondents had no plans to introduce a policy – perhaps indicative of the early stage libraries are still at with experimenting with social media.
Reasons for using social media covered a wide range of objectives, including:
seeking the opinion of library users
reaching users in their homes or ‘virtual spaces’
Promotional purposes, such as publicizing events, services, or new content
To connect with specific user groups and network with other librarians
To build a sense of community
To track the effectiveness of social media, Hootsuite was the most popular tool with 53% of respondents using this service.
The survey suggested attitudes towards social media assessment are changing. While 72% felt there was currently no or little value to tracking social media results, a similar number (70%) envisaged spending more time in the future with measuring the impact their social media activity had.
53% of libraries use Hootsuite to track effectiveness of posts

14. Most used…
“Our main channels are Twitter and Facebook… but we’re also on Slideshare, YouTube and Tumblr”
Kim
The social media channels most frequently mentioned by our focus groups and in our phone interviews were Twitter and Facebook, with the latter particularly key for engaging with students. Twitter is felt to be more effective for communicating with researchers and other institutions. Blogs are used for sharing information and news.
YouTube was cited as being useful for providing instructional information and for collection management.
Academia.edu and ResearchGate are seen as being of interest but their lack of connectivity with libraries and publishers is seen as a problem.
Least used…

15. Rise of the Visual Channels
“We use Pinterest for new acquisitions in the last 6 months, with a new board each month.”
From US-based focus group:
“School librarians are saying children search by image first.”
Kim
In our focus groups and interviews librarians reported an accelerating uptake of visual channels, such as Slideshare, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram. YouTube is being used for educational purposes, Pinterest for showcasing new acquisitions, and Flickr for posting photos of library activities such as a refurbishment.
Part of the rise of the usage of more visual channels seems to be reflecting changes in the way in which people are responding to visual over verbal messages. Multiple sources report that in social media marketing, visual postings attract higher levels of engagement. We’re able to process images 60,000 times faster than text, so part of this preference may be reflective of a growing preference as the volume of information that we’re exposed to every day continues to grow.
In the Taylor & Francis survey, when we asked librarians whether they agreed that visual communication was becoming more important in social media, 81% agreed.
With information overload continuing to be a problem, a continued move towards greater use of image-based social media channels by librarians is likely.
“Communication is becoming more and more visual, and less text-based….So any Social Media tools that employ Geographic Information Systems (Tools for community mapping), video, and images over text will become more popular in the future." Rachel Wexelbaum, St Cloud State University.

16. Top 5 uses for social media in the library
Events promotion 76%
Library Services Promotion 72%
Resources/collections promotion 70%
Library refurbishment updates 63%
Promotion of new acquisitions 61%
Nerida
We asked librarians to rate how important Social Media is to achieve a set of objectives in their library. The results indicated that social media is primarily being used by libraries currently to fulfil marketing and promotional objectives, whether that be the promotion of events, collections or services. However, engagement with faculty and students is not far behind in terms of priorities.

17. 5 least popular uses for social media in the library
Highlighting subject specific information 38%
Connecting with potential students 34%
As a teaching tool to promote information literacy etc 22%
To promote courses 25%
As a research tool to locate official documents 21%
Nerida
Using social media in a teaching or learning capacity is a much lower priority currently; the three lowest scoring objectives were: (a) using social media as a teaching tool, (b) as a tool for promoting courses, and (c) as a research/discovery tool to find relevant materials

18. Opportunities and Challenges
Kim
So, now let’s take a look at some of the opportunities and challenges that social media usage presents.

19. What are the opportunities that Social Media presents to the library?
Kim
The most popular opportunity relating to the use of social media was the chance to raise the professional profile of the library, with 72% of survey respondents feeling this was an opportunity.
Other opportunities cited included the freedom to connect regularly with users and collaboration with other departments within the organization, indicating perhaps that social media is seen as a freer, alternative communication channel which can be used in a more informal way to reach key audiences.
Advantages and benefits for libraries through using social media are seen to be:
Perceived low costs with little required training
Promotional messages and news disseminated quickly
The promotion of library holdings helping to increase usage of content
Increasing engagement and interaction with library users
A channel through which to gain feedback and enhance user services
Outreach activities through onward sharing beyond the institution itself

20. What are the challenges that social media presents in the library?
Kim
The most significant challenge to the survey respondents was seen to be time and resource, with 67% stating this was a challenging issue. This was followed by judging an appropriate tone for communications (formal vs. informal, with 64% citing this as a challenge), and making sure others were aware of the library’s social media activities (61%).
Other challenges which were seen to be a significant issue were:
Considerable time commitment required from library staff;
The requirement of technological expertise
Selecting an informal but presentable tone, or delivering social media content in a bilingual or multilingual regions;
Levels of interest in and skills with using social media varying enormously across library staff;
Limited funds to support more advanced social media usage/features and the training that would be required to enable this;
Maintaining engagement with library users and attracting popularity (followers, likes and so on);
The difficulty in maintaining library branding for content/resources made accessible via social media;
Potential copyright issues when using social media such as YouTube to build collections;
External factors such as Internet connectivity, technological infrastructure and government restrictions on the use of social media may restrict access
The common themes which re-emerged from respondents indicated that they were concerned about the amount of time and level of skillset needed in order to adequately maintain a social media channel and benefit from a good level of returned success.

21. Channel applications
Nerida
And channel applications?

22. Uses for Social Media Channels
Twitter
Distribute library news and information
Provide customer service
Build connections with researchers
Build connections with other librarians and institutions
Facebook
More social and less formal than Twitter – share photographs and run competitions
Arrange events including tracking RSVPs and sending event updates
Engagement with students
Pinterest
Promote general library collections, digital and archive special collections and information literacy
Set up of online repositories for students to pin researched references as part of collaborative group work
Display book titles to save time browsing and promote new titles
Provide an arena for students and course leaders to pin reviewed and recommended reading for a particular topic
Develop communities with other online libraries
YouTube
Streaming film collections
Instructional ‘how to’ videos teaching information literacy skills and how to use library services and resources
Nerida
We looked more closely at how libraries were using social media for specific tasks, and which channels they felt best served a specific purpose. We’ve grouped these, per channel, in this slide.

23. Customer Service
One of the most common developing uses of social media is to deliver customer service – particularly through Twitter
A key challenge for librarians is responding in a timely fashion, as users expect quick answers
Librarians reported declining use of websites to deliver customer services information – social media by contrast is a better way of providing up-to-minute updates
From India-based focus group:
“At times there are so many postings and because of other commitments we are not able to reply as fast as we ought to”
Kim
Using social media as a customer service tool was frequently cited across our research. Twitter in particular is a medium used for this purpose.
A key challenge relating to customer service provision via social media is responding in a timely fashion, as users expect quick answers to their questions.
Institutions in our focus groups reported declining usage of websites for accessing library service information, with some suggesting that these pages were now used primarily by external audiences. However, librarians were still putting effort into maintaining current information on them. It was felt that social media – because of its immediacy and transient nature – was a better way to provide ongoing updates of information that was changing with any degree of frequency. s are still used for important reminders.

24. Twitter as a customer services tool
Kim
From UK–based focus group: The website was at its peak three years ago. Now, for example if there is snow closure, the last place they would look is the website; but it is the first place my colleagues would go to update information.

25. Driving user engagement
Social media has the potential to help create and build strongly connected communities
From our US-based focus group:
One of the opportunities with social media is listening to your community … I think that’s primarily why we have a Twitter account, and we have also claimed our Foursquare location, so we kind of can listen and monitor and do that kind of work, so that’s yielded some pretty positive reviews and results.
Nerida
This idea of listening can be a passive process, by reading and responding to people who have engaged with your channel, or an active one, where librarians are actively polling their users, as is the case in the next example:

26. Case study: using Soapbox to drive user engagement
Polling software Soapbox was used to encourage interaction with students
A button was added to Blackboard to enable users to post ideas which could then be voted on
Encouraged interaction along with a sense of co-responsibility/ownership of issues and opportunities
Nerida
One institution in the UK focus group was using polling software from a company called Soapbox to encourage interaction with students. All input is welcomed, whether it be ideas, suggestions for change or complaints. Other users can then vote for their favourite idea so that the most popular suggestions become most visible on the site with the student’s name against it.
The most popular ideas are put forward each month to senior managers, who review and decide which resulting action to take. A senior manager will also provide a commentary on why the decision has been made so that users are provided with a rationale behind the decision making process.
The institution found the feedback they sourced through this medium invaluable. They particularly welcomed student complaints as it enabled the institution to move forward and improve. The system was found to provide a real sense of empowerment to students and they always knew they would receive a quick response to their suggestion. It enables people across the whole institution to work together to solve problems.

27. Collection Development and Management
Activities using social media to encourage usage of collections are diverse and ad hoc
From the results of the survey, promoting the library’s collection was within the top 3 objectives for using social media
Challenging to provide tailored communications to users with niche interests
Main channels used to promote library resources were Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Pinterest
Listening is felt to be as important as broadcasting
Kim
Social media is regularly used to promote collections, particularly core databases, but current activities are diverse and ad hoc.
From the results of the survey Taylor & Francis undertook, promoting the library‘s collection was within the top 3 objectives for using social media.
A key challenge, however, was found to be the niche interest of library users, which made it difficult to serve up tailored communications. One suggestion was to work more closely with subject experts in using social media to engage with users with relevant content.
In our survey, ResearchGate, Snapchat, Academia.edu and Slideshare were found to be the most effective, however Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Pinterest were used most frequently. This could indicate that while the former channels are believed to be effective, they aren’t at present highly used by librarians.
Social media was recognised as having potential to encourage dialogue with users, providing opportunities for collection development. Listening was felt to be as important as broadcasting. Social media was frequently cited as a powerful collection management tool, both for hosting resources and transforming digital cataloguing.

28. Case study: YouTube as collection management tool
From a US-based librarian interview:
“As a collection management tool, YouTube is unparalleled. [We] made a switch from Content DM to YouTube because [we] realized [our] digital video collections were not accessible to the common user … It became clear that a social media platform such as YouTube was the key to unlocking the great collections that we have online for our future audiences.”
Kim
One of the librarians interviewed via telephone detailed how YouTube was a valuable collection management tool for the University of British Columbia. The library uses webcasting services as a way to deliver broadcasts through the internet. These broadcasts are delivered via YouTube so that end users are able to easily view content from the comfort of their own desktops.
UBC feel that YouTube is unparalleled in its accessibility for end users, and in the appeal that the social media channel has. Strengths cited include the length of time users spend on the channel, the use of the channel by a large non-US audience, and the ease of use via a mobile device. The institution went as far as to replace their existing collection management tool (ContentDM) to YouTube because of the improved accessibility. It also enabled a move from a rigid taxonomy to a folksonomy, a system of classification derived from categorizing, tagging and annotation from external user groups.

29. Policy and management
Nerida

30. Promoting social networking sites
Nerida
We asked librarians how they promoted their social networking sites. Perhaps the most interesting finding was that nearly a third did no promotion of their sites. This is perhaps indicative of the nature of social media, that the experience was that users managed to find accounts which held interest for them, with no promotion being carried out.

31. Management of Social Media Accounts
Nerida
We asked librarians whether they used any Social Media management tools to manage their accounts. These tools can be helpful when managing multiple channels, or multiple accounts on the same channel.
Interestingly, monitoring accounts seems to be a relatively new initiative, with the majority not using any tool, and of those that did, Hootsuite being the favourite.

32. Measuring impact Nerida
We found in our research that measurement of impact is generally ad hoc, but some institutions were beginning to analyse results more closely using tools such as Hootsuite and SumAll and also the basic reports available from Twitter and Facebook. The experimental nature of communications and the relative newness of the channels make benchmarking very difficult.
In our in-depth interviews, one librarian describes how she has championed measuring social media within her library:
Previously, she tracked social media engagement on the accounts she controlled and shared the metrics with other accounts. With the information she gathered she was able present to the Library Executive audit and persuade the LE of the importance of reflecting on the results of social media because so much staff and student time is spent on it. Some of her colleagues still question the value of measuring social media but the Library Executive is now convinced of its importance. Following the audit, she launched a metrics campaign and training for staff.
Some of her colleagues think that they can measure engagement by the number of likes and followers on social media, but the librarian emphasises a focus on click-through data and encourages others to do so too. Favourites tracking on Facebook and Twitter are another way she measures engagement.

33. Future of social media
Kim
Ah for that elusive crystal ball!

34. Future of social media Kim
Many of our librarians were particularly interested in the future of social media, and as you can see from the answers to the two questions above, the majority of librarians see it having an important place in the library going forward and expect to see dedicated social media roles appear.
How and what that future might look like was harder for some to articulate, but the next slide gives some ideas:

35. Future of social media
@LibraryLantern #tfsocialmedia use of social media in future - Greater use. More “noise”. Need to be Future: ephemeral networks – real time exchange of ideas - Snapchat. Social media as part of digital We all need to get better at filtering social media, sift out useful info from the rest. Staff and students! #tfsocialmedia
Kim
Some of the ideas that librarians suggested included a need for the library to be more strategic, and to develop ways to filter out social noise so that students and staff can pinpoint useful information.
Librarians also believed there would be a shift to some of the emerging smaller social networks, with a decline in popularity amongst the incoming student population of Facebook.

36. Nerida & Kim