Elisha Taylor
In a world where information can be overwhelming, students often turn to their academic library for assistance and clarity, but how can we reach the students we serve that never set foot inside the doors of their campus library? Commuters and distance learners can be easily forgotten when considering factors for student engagement and interaction. However, by incorporating social media into an academic library’s engagement plan, even students not there in body can still be part of the library’s agenda. Continue for several crucial sources for academic libraries to consider and incorporate when developing social media plans for student interaction.
#1 Which platform is the right platform?
According to the Pew Research Center, 88% of 18-to 29-year-olds use some form of social media. The most popular platforms today are YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, respectively, with the college demographic using them more frequently than individuals older and younger than them.
#2 Step 1: What is Social Media and What Can We Do With It?
Good research starts at the ground level and builds up. This source takes a deeper look into creating, promoting, and managing social media for academic libraries. It also underlines the importance of monitoring student interactions and updating procedures and protocols as needed to ensure the library's student engagement is successful.
#3 Step 2: Determining How Students Use Social Media
This article dives into how students use social media and what expectations they have when logging into their favorite social media sites. Undertanding these uses and expectations makes content design a little more clear.
#4 Step 3: How Does Social Media Allow Us to Engage?
This source provides useful information for developing a social media plan and building an academic library’s social media profile. Discover tips and tricks for designing and implementing social media strategies for academic libraries and learn about successful and not-so successful techniques tested by other libraries using social media for student engagement.
#5 Step 4: Turning Theory into Practical Application
In this article you will discover why individuals use social media and how user engagement is shaped. This article is critical for understanding the context of user interactions in social media based on both the platform being used and the initial presentation of the social media account towards those with whom it will be interacting.
#6 Step 5: Acting Now While Looking Ahead
Discover what students and patrons expect from social media pages they follow and consider ways of incorporating original content for future social media users with this descriptive and useful article.
#7 Step 6: Getting Specific with Your Content
It is important to engage your public through multiple platforms due to the shift in popularity of each site. It may be helpful to arrange your platforms based on content and the types of posts which are well suited to that particular platform style. This article is a fine example of creating user-friendly content on a specific platform without letting your posts stagnate.
#8 Step 7: It’s All About the Timing
This blog post explains the steps involved in identifying the best (and worst) times to post to your academic library's social media account. By following simple steps listed in this blog for accessing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram analytics, you can determine the "most-active" times for user engagement and plan your posts accordingly.
#9 Step 8: Measuring Success and Changing It Up
How do you determine success of student engagement on social media? When do you know when your methods need to be adjusted? This article provides information to answer these questions along with other useful information regarding successful social media outreach and best practices for academic libraries.
#10 Step 9: The account was created and the post was made. Now what?
Discover useful tips for the promotion of library services through social media accounts. Consider posting policies for library staff and read about the risks and rewards of allowing comments on a public social media page. This article outlines much needed processes for handling business related social media accounts and everything that comes with it.
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