Community building as an effective user engagement strategy: A case study in academic libraries

Organizations have recognized that engaging with customers on social media is now a critical element of their public relations strategy, but many struggle to find the optimal way to use these new tools. This study examined the success factors of online posts from organizations in evoking a high level of response from group members. Specifically, appeals to community belongingness were discovered to be effective at motivating user engagement on social media. The impact of community‐focused language on garnering likes, comments, and shares was assessed using a methodology that combined text analytics, supervised machine learning, and multilevel regression. In 51,760 postings from 100 academic libraries, it was found that general community appeals increase likes by 60%, comments by 130%, and shares by 39%, whereas specific intracommunity, locally meaningful references increase likes by 16% and shares by 12%. These findings have both theoretical implications, as they constitute a large‐scale, empirical confirmation of the belongingness hypothesis from social psychology, and practical implications, as they suggest best practices for maintaining an organizational online presence.