Looking for Libraries in Analytics - Beth Wolf Blog Post #7

 While looking over this week's activities and readings, I had a hard time connecting this to actionable items and takeaway learnings that I could see making a difference in my future career working in a public library. While businesses with tangible products are at the forefront of this week's focus, especially in the readings in my opinion, libraries don't really have "products" that they actively sell. While thinking about this, I have to bring it back to the purpose and mission of many public libraries that I have seen. Most mention being informative and creating community - both of these things you can do on social media, regardless of what analytics might tell you about the "product" you are "selling."

My point is,  I am not sure what kind of data that analytics would actually provide that would change the actions of a public library posting on social media. They are still going to post about their events to get the word out and hope that more people might see the post and attend. They are still going to share changes to their regular business hours to inform the community that they will not be open. I am just not sure what sort of insights can be gained from analytics for a library. In addition, I don't see a paid analytics platform ever being an approved use of budget funds.

Now, I have a small caveat to my ranting: I have not had the opportunity to work in a public library at this time, so I could be totally off base. And I absolutely welcome the chance to be educated on the ways that a public library uses social media analytics in positive ways. My biggest point is that this class is a Library and Information Science offering and I just struggle when the content does not relate back to libraries at all. 

In the article The Power of Social Media Analytics, the authors cite a survey that indicated the 3 top concerns among marketers regarding analytics (Fan & Gordon, 2014, p. 81). They are:

  1. Tracking your return on investment within social media
  2. identifying and engaging with influential social media users
  3. Creating the most effective social media strategy.
The only concern that I see translating to a library is maybe how to create the most effective social media strategy. And that is more about not wasting the library staff's time and energy on posts that no one will look at or engage with, especially if they are a heavy lift for the staff or require research. The library is not selling anything and is not looking to make a profit so a return on investment is not precisely the right words I would use for what they would be looking for from using social media or the analytic tools. In addition, I really don't see any value with a public library engaging with influencers. If they do want to promote that people should go to their local library, then that is great and it absolutely earns a thumbs-up from me! But just like I don't think that a paid analytics platform would be an approved use of budget funds, I can almost guarantee that paying for an influencer to say nice things about the library would not be approved either.

I'm looking to be proved wrong here though so, dearest readers, those that do work in a public library, if you do use your social media analytics, I would love to hear your personal experience with them and how you use them to inform your posting strategy!


Reference:
Fan, W., & Gordon, M. D. (2014). The power of social media analytics. Communications of the ACM, 57(6), 74-81.

Comments

  1. Christina BeiderbeckeOctober 20, 2025 at 11:29 AM

    The library where I work does use the dashboard analytics that are provided by Facebook to help us review the engagement metrics on our posts. It helps us to understand what types of posts our followers engage with more often and how often they are sharing our content with others or on their own FB page. Analytics help us in so many ways, such as when we want to pinpoint the areas of interest we need to concentrate on for our outreach programs or when we need to increase posting about an event in order to create chatter about the event. Example - when we are going to have a showing of Lilo & Stitch 2025 on an afternoon when the local school has half a day of school. If the metrics show us that the posting is not being seen by many people, we can contact some of the parents of our regular attendees and see if they could help us out by engaging with the posts in order to "boost" the posts so that Facebook will show it to more people. Some of the bigger libraries, like Albany Public Library, has a social media manager who pays attention very closely to the analytics of their social media presence and has learned how to make huge increases to some of their library goals because of it.

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