A couple months ago the Special Libraries Association hosted a webinar: Using Analytics to Understand Social Media Activity. The abstract for the event mentioned the lack of research into the success of social media use by libraries, and promised presenters would “suggest better strategies for user engagement,” as well as “tools and methods that can be used to conduct social media analytics.” Unfortunately I was unable to attend the webinar in real-time, but the SLA has made the webinar’s audio, a transcript, and the PowerPoint presentation available to view on its website.

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/analytics/features/mobile.html

Michelle Chen, an assistant professor at the School of Information at San Jose State University presented the webinar. Dr. Chen discussed two research projects. One was designed to facilitate an understanding of user behavior and its implications in online environments. Another used information visualization to enhance knowledge discovery.

Research Project #1:Twitter Sentiment Analysis for Understanding Citizens’ Trust in Government

• Collected 1 million tweets from users reacting to official city, mayor, and police department accounts
• Conducted sentiment analysis (also called “opinion mining”) to uncover citizen attitudes towards government

Sentiment Analysis, Michelle Chen. 

Research Project #2: Quantitative Analytics for Library User Engagement Strategies through Social Media: Pinterest and Twitter

•  Studied 10 libraries using Pinterest and Twitter and categorized engagement in 4 categories: Literature exhibits, Engaging topic, Community building and Library showcasing.
• Developed metrics for analyzing Pinterest (followers, re-pinning, liking, etc.) and Twitter (topic modeling- looked for patterns in topics) 

Some Recommended Tools

• Many Eyes — a data visualization tool that is free and requires no programming or technical expertise (see a free video tutorial here)
• KDNuggets — data mining techniques website
• Splunk, an operational intelligence platform: “It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure.”
• R — a free, open-source statistical programming language that allows users to interpret, interact with and visualize data quickly and easily.

Conclusions about Ways Social Media Analytics Can Be Used: 

• To understand library users’ attitudes and to identify trends
• To manage online identity/reputation of a library
• To predict user behavior / needs
• To tailor social media campaigns and effectively target users
• To identify “primary influencers” in social networks and target them

TapeMeasure, by Louise Docker, Wikimedia Commons

In the field of scholarly publishing, the importance of a particular work has historically been measured by the number of times it is cited by other articles, known as citation impact. As scholarly work is increasingly shared and discussed online, we’ve seen the emergency of altmetrics: an alternative method of measuring the impact of academic works using web data. Altmetrics considers not only number of citations, but also other factors that indicate impact, including number of views or downloads and mentions in social media or news (known as social engagement data). According to altmetrics, this means that each time someone mentions a particular article on Twitter or Facebook, for example, the overall impact of that article is believed to increase. The logic (which makes sense to me), is that the more that people are talking about and sharing something, the more influential it is.

The issue of determining scholarly impact will be of interest to many academic librarians, especially anyone who works in the field of scholarly communications. Altmetrics is also worth exploring for librarians and other information professionals working outside of academic libraries, because altmetrics can also be used to measure the impact of individual people, organizations, videos, websites and more.

A few months ago, I came across Altmetric.com‘s list of 2014’s Top 100 academic papers online. The list aggregates the papers that received the most attention online and then ranks them, using article-level metrics (ALM). It’s fascinating to see the different places that the papers were mentioned, and how many times. As social media becomes an increasingly major way that people consume and share news and information, I think it’s entirely appropriate that the impact of an article take into consideration its spread on social media.

http://www.altmetric.com/top100/2014/

According to Altmetric.com, the top paper of the year was “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The article presents the results of an experiment the researchers conducted to demonstrate that Facebook users’ moods can be manipulated by adjusting what types of stories (uplifting, depressing, etc.) appear in their news feeds. I definitely remember hearing about this article multiple times through my own social media channels. The article was mentioned in:

• 301 news stories
• 130 blog posts (make that 131!)
• 3,801 tweets
• 10 peer reviews
• 342 Facebook posts
• 115 Google+ posts
• 14 Reddit posts

Altmetrics is a fascinating new field that will likely grow more important in coming years. Librarians should consider the ways that they can use altmetrics to measure the impact of their own work, the work of faculty members, and perhaps the impact and use of library collections, particularly content available in open access institutional repositories like UBC’s cIRcle.

I recently read a white paper by Taylor & Francis (October 2014) titled, Use of social media by the library: current practices and future opportunities. The paper provides an overview of how libraries world-wide are using social media, finding that current use of social media tends to be “ad hoc and somewhat experimental.”

Some interesting findings: 

• More than 70% of libraries use social media (I was surprised it wasn’t more)
• Only 28% of librarians surveyed said their library had a social media policy!
• Facebook & Twitter are the most popular channels, but libraries are increasingly adopting visual channels (Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, etc.)
• The main reasons libraries give for using social media is promotion
• 88% of those surveyed believe social media will become more important to libraries in the future

I was very surprised that so few libraries have official social media policies. Considering how frequently social media blunders are putting organizations in the news these days, I’d consider that to be a top priority for any organization that uses social media. At the same time, I think it’s essential to keep a casualness and a feeling that actual people are posting from the accounts of organizations, and this means granting the people who manage social media at libraries and other organizations a certain amount of freedom when posting content.

The report provides links to three libraries that have implemented social media policies:

• University of Maryland: University Libraries Social Media Guidelines
• CSUSM Library Social Media Guidelines
• University of Pennsylvania Social Media Guidelines

It’s interesting to see the differences in each of these policies. The University of Maryland Libraries policy is very short and basically states that all postings, comments, and messages are the opinion of the editor only: “Publication of a comment does not imply endorsement or agreement by the University of Maryland or the University Libraries.” I was very surprised to see this policy, as it indicates a lack of an overarching social media strategy and the lack of concern about representing the university of its library system as a unified organization.

The CSUSM Library policy is longer and gives much more clearly defined instructions about the library’s goals in using social media, who/what the library should follow, information about administration of social media accounts, and a very helpful list of best practices which I recommend you check out.

The University of Pennsylvania seems to be still in the process of developing a university-wide social media policy that is not specific to the library, and focuses on other aspects of social media including its use in hiring people to the university.

My name is Liz and I am in the Master’s of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Science (started the program in January 2014). I am writing this blog as part of an assignment for LIBR 559M: Social Media for Information Professionals.

I use a variety of social media in my personal life each day. I have had personal blogs in the past but have ended up deleting them all at one point or another. I use Goodreads to track and share all of the books that I read. I also use Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. I know that Pinterest has its critics, but I find it quite useful for organizing things like recipes, things that I like about particular cities, and even historic photos. 99% of the time spent on Facebook seems like a waste (or worse)—but I know that if I didn’t have an account I’d also miss out on a lot of information and updates from friends and organizations. I “follow” a lot of organizations including libraries.

I have a twitter account that I have tried using intermittently but I have never really enjoyed using twitter. For jobs past and present (including for a museum and libraries) I’ve used the following social media platforms: blogs, facebook, twitter, and flickr. I actually really enjoy using social media for organizations/professionally, much more than using it personally.

In my personal life I use Feedly to keep track of various blogs that I follow, including a variety of library blogs and library job sites. For this class I plan to set up a hootsuite account to keep track of blog postings. I’ve heard hootsuite mentioned a lot and it seems like a good thing to know how to use.