Learning Goals

What are current best practices for libraries using social media?

In order to use social media to its best effect, libraries must have a plan and a strategy in place before beginning the process. The library must develop, in advance, internal policies and plans to ensure that staff uses the library’s accounts appropriately and effectively (How Libraries Are Applying Social Media, 2021). The work of maintaining the library’s social media accounts must be shared among a number of workers, and established policies are essential if that is to be done (Reardon, 2019). Additionally, the planning process will allow the library to develop a unified and distinctive voice. The power of social media is that it allows people to build connections, and a bland, corporate account will not inspire the kind of connections that creates a virtual community.

It is also critical to develop and enforce standards of acceptable behavior for community members to follow. These standards should be broad enough to apply to all comments or posts, but must be specific enough to be useful. Vague standards that are open to interpretation make enforcement difficult for library staff and confusing to community members (Baiocchi, 2019). Public libraries have the additional responsibility to uphold First Amendment protections as a governmental entity. The ALA (2018) notes that public libraries can set and enforce standards of participation for their virtual spaces, just as they do for their physical spaces. There are certain types of speech that are unprotected (such as obscenity or threats), and users should be warned that these types of speech will not be permitted. Additionally, libraries can encourage users to engage respectfully and civilly, even if that suggestion cannot be enforced.

In order to accomplish each of these goals, virtual community management tasks and duties must be supported with adequate resources by library administration. This includes both adequate funding and sufficient staffing. Facebook employs armies of moderators (themselves, and through an army of subcontractors) to keep graphic and explicit content off the network. It takes a huge toll on the moderators, and they tend to be overworked and undersupported simultaneously (Newton, 2019). Certainly librarians won’t have to deal with that volume (or hopefully that despicable) level of content, but the role of moderation is a challenging one and requires an adequate level of support.

What can libraries learn from other organizations that use social media?

At the most prosaic, libraries can learn from a recent trend in social media, and that is a focus on video and livestreaming. Websites and media companies have been “pivoting to video” since 2015 (Moore, 2017), but as librarians, it can be hard to leave the safety and security of the written word for the intimacy of stepping in front of the camera. But especially since the lockdowns and quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become used to connecting with others via FaceTime and Zoom (Zote, 2021), and libraries will have to use the same format to build their virtual communities.

Additionally, libraries will have to incorporate lessons learned from the corporate social media world, which has been analyzing the ROI of each and every social media post since Friendster. One crucial lesson is known as the 80/20 rule. This rule dictates that no more than 20% of your social media posts should be devoted to actively marketing your organization or events (How to Use the 80/20 Rule to Conquer Social Media Marketing, 2017). The other 80% should be interactions with the members of your virtual community that serve no commercial purpose. Otherwise, your posts and comments will blend into the stream of advertising that any denizen of social media must learn to ignore.

Following the 80/20 rule will, by necessity lead to a much more high-level rule of building a virtual community, and that is to genuinely and authentically seek to create a community, and not just use social media as another facet of advertising. It is a challenge to do this from an institutional perspective, instead of a personal one. This is another reason to develop policies and practices that are shared amongst all the people who are involved in the library’s social media accounts (Young & Rossmann, 2015).

What can libraries offer to a virtual community that other organizations can not?

Libraries represent a unique type of physical space and service model, open to all in the community, offering an increasing range of resources while asking little in return. Can we as libraries translate our position in our “actual” communities to a similar one in our virtual communities? First of all, the library as a safe and trusted provider of information is one that translates easily to the digital world. As information becomes easier to create and distribute, and as the volume of information people encounter throughout their lives increases, libraries can and should be places to turn to in the virtual world. A computer-mediated system is easier for patrons to interface with (no need to travel to the library) and it has proven to be less intimidating for students, leading to increased usage (Kitsantas & Chow, 2007) and 78% of Americans believe their library helps them find trustworthy information.

Libraries also have the advantage of bridging the gap between the institution (government, university, school, etc) and the public. This allows libraries to provide a virtual service that is similar to the one many libraries, especially (but not exclusively) public libraries already offer - they connect patrons not just with information, but with services and organizations that can actively help them. Some libraries have gone so far as to include social workers in their staff. It is possible that the even more efficient connections and interconnections that a virtual community makes possible will increase transparency and reduce corruption at higher levels of government (Bertot et al., 2010).

What is the future of social media and virtual communities?

One interesting possibility for the future of social media is a less-connected vision. Partly driven by concerns about the ways social media companies are protecting users’ data (or, more specifically failing to protect users’ data) and by the realities of harassment and abuse, some users are moving to more private virtual communities. “In the next decade, as we reassess our relationship with social media – and by extension, the Big Tech companies that run them – we will see more people leave public platforms entirely, sticking instead to small communities and friendship groups on more private platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.” (Kesvani, 2021) Group messaging apps like Discord and Slack would also fall into that less-public category, not to mention safe spaces like Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons - a beacon of casual connection in a post-COVID world (MacDonald, 2021).

In addition to its dramatic real-world consequences, the US Presidential election of 2020 and the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 may also shape our online spaces in the future. The banning of President Donald Trump from the Twitter platform has some lawmakers seeking to place limits on the political influence of social media companies. In a separate push, looming legal battles over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which prevents online providers from being held liable for the speech of users of their service) may require more intensive moderation and oversight (Cervone, 2021).

References

Baiocchi, S. (2019, August 23). How to Create & Enforce Rules for an Online Community. https://www.impactplus.com/blog/how-to-create-enforce-rules-for-an-online-community

Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Grimes, J. M. (2010). Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies. Government Information Quarterly, 27(3), 264–271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2010.03.001

Cervone, E. (2021, July 12). What Is the Future of Social Media Regulation? The Regulatory Review. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/07/12/cervone-future-social-media-regulation/

How libraries are applying social media. (2021). Librarian Resources. https://librarianresources.taylorandfrancis.com/library-insights/library-advocacy/how-libraries-are-applying-social-media/

How to Use the 80/20 Rule to Conquer Social Media Marketing. (2017, September 13). VirTasktic. https://www.virtasktic.com/clueless-social-media-marketing/

Kesvani, H. (2021, April 26). The future of social media is sharing less, not more. Wired UK. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-future-sharing

Kitsantas, A., & Chow, A. (2007). College students’ perceived threat and preference for seeking help in traditional, distributed, and distance learning environments. Computers & Education, 48(3), 383–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.01.008

MacDonald, K. (2021, June 11). Are Virtual Worlds The Future of Social Media? ELLE. https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/elle-voices/a36606739/virtual-worlds-future-social-media/

Moore, H. (2017, September 26). The secret cost of pivoting to video. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pivot-to-video.php

Newton, C. (2019, February 25). The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona

Reardon, M. (2019, April 11). Libraries and social media: Not your grandma’s library. CNET. https://www.cnet.com/news/libraries-lean-on-twitter-facebook-and-instagram-to-reel-you-in/

Social Media Guidelines for Public and Academic Libraries. (2018, July 2). [Text]. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/socialmediaguidelines

Young, S. W. H., & Rossmann, D. (2015). Building Library Community Through Social Media. Information Technology and Libraries, 34(1), 20–37. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v34i1.5625

Zote, J. (2021, February 9). The most important social media trends to know for 2021. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-trends/