#LibraryLife: A quantitative analysis of social media usage, content, and engagement at the Vancouver Public Library

Sam Vander Kooy

doi:10.29173/cais1214

Abstract

This paper explores the contents of the Vancouver Public Library’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube feeds between September 1st and November 30th, 2020 to better understand how each social media platform is being used to communicate with stakeholders. This quantitative content analysis of each platform’s usage, content, and engagement highlights some important trends libraries should be aware of concerning both the use of multiple social media platforms and the evaluation of their current social media strategies.

Highlights

Due to social distancing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, many public libraries are changing the way they offer services and programming to their patrons with the majority using social media to keep patrons informed of these changes (PLA 2020; MLA 2020; OLA 2020)
The first longitudinally explores the adoption rates and usage patterns of four social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr – in academic libraries in the United States, whereas the second analyzes the types of content being disseminated on six social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google +, Instagram – by school libraries in the Extremadura region of Spain
42% of the content Vancouver Public Library (VPL) posts to its social media platforms consists of overlapping content (Figure 4)

Summary

Introduction

Due to social distancing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, many public libraries are changing the way they offer services and programming to their patrons with the majority (over 80%) using social media to keep patrons informed of these changes (PLA 2020; MLA 2020; OLA 2020). These novel circumstances provide an excellent opportunity to investigate how public libraries are promoting their changing services across different social media platforms. This study, is intended to advance the understanding of multi-platform social media use within the context of public libraries

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Conclusion