Content Generation and Social Network Interaction within Academic Library Facebook Pages

Abstract

The use of Facebook to share resources and engage patrons continues to gain acceptance within academic libraries. While many studies have analyzed the types of content academic libraries share on Facebook, there has not yet been a full examination of how this content is generated. This article examined the posting methods, the user responses, and the types of organizations followed on 28 academic library Facebook pages. User response was found to be inversely related to the popularity of a posting method. Pages from a library's home institution and from other libraries were the two types of sites most frequently followed.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• academic libraries
• content generation
• user interaction

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ginna Gauntner Witte is the Coordinator of Circulation Services at Cincinnati State Technical & Community College. Portions of this article were presented originally as a poster at the Association of College & Research Libraries’ annual conference in April 2013 in Indianapolis, IN.