Monthly Archives: February 2015

Google Analytics, Social Media & Libraries

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Flickr,

Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been learning to use Google Analytics, a service by Google that tracks a variety of data and statistics about websites. I’ve been learning to use the service as part of my job as an assistant at UBC’s Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office, which is part of the UBC Library. I’ve been impressed at how much it’s possible to glean about how people are using your website by analyzing the data that Google Analytics collects. Some data it tracks includes:

  • How are people finding your site? (through key word searches, typing the URL into the browser, links from other pages, social media, etc.)
  • How engaged are they once they reach your site? (average # of pages viewed per session, average amount of time spent on the site, etc.)
  • What are your user demographics? (geographically, linguistically, gender, age, and even interests!)
  • How many visitors are new vs. returning?
  • Much more!

Google Analytics also allows you to filter all of this data based on a variety of criteria (i.e. what’s the average amount of time spent on the “Resources” page by first-time visitors who found the site through a search engine).

Measuring the Impact of Social Media
As mentioned earlier, the service can track the visitors who reach your website through a social media channel. This means that you can see how many people came to your website because of a specific Facebook post or tweet. I think this is a great tool for measuring the effectiveness of social media, particularly for measuring the effectiveness of a particular social media campaign. For example, perhaps you want to increase usage of a particular digital collections site. You could devise a strategy for promoting the collection on social media, and then see how many people you attracted through that channel. You could also analyze the effective postings and try to identify why they were successful in engaging users.

Google Analytics is set up to work most effectively when you also set up goals for your website. The process seems very straightforward for for-profit businesses: sales = success. It seems more difficult to create goals for non-profit organizations such as libraries and museums. I wonder how many libraries and museums have specific goals for their websites and social media campaigns/presences. As social media becomes more prevalent in libraries, archives, and museums, I hope that people start to think more about the strategies behind its use as well as techniques for evaluating what it is actually accomplishing.

Social Media Use and Policies in Libraries

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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:

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.