Exploring user engagement strategies and their impacts with social media mining: the case of public libraries

Public libraries are increasingly using social media to connect their users in innovative ways. Librarians make use of social media as a tool for ‘being part of their communities’, promoting library services and events, and creating participatory services. However, little empirical investigation has explored the success of such social media use by libraries. In this paper, we study the role of Twitter for engaging users via a focus on public libraries. We use topic-modeling techniques to classify library user engagement strategies into four categories: literature exhibits, engaging topics, community building and library showcasing. These four engagement strategies are re-examined via a sentiment analysis of tweets collected from 10 public libraries over 3 months. Through data mining of tweets, we explore how user engagement strategies are used by libraries on Twitter, and suggest the best practices for libraries interested in pursuing social media initiatives to use to engage their users effectively.