Social media insights

Did you know that a small team of only 4 people are working daily to produce social media posts for the library’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages? They are Elsabé Olivier, Lidia Swart, Nikki Haw and Zenzi Msweli.

At the beginning of the year Elsabé Olivier, who is responsible for marketing which includes social media, introduced hashtag days. Lidia Swart and Nikki Haw were kind enough to volunteer their services and the following hashtag posts for the five days of the week were introduced:

• Monday:  #MondayMotivation (initially created and posted by Nadia Grobler and now Lidia Swart)
• Tuesday:  #TuesdaySelfie (created and posted by Elsabé Olivier)
• Wednesday: #WednesdayWisdom (created and posted by Nadia Grobler and now Zenzi Msweli)
• Thursday: #ThrowbackThursday (created and posted by Nikki Haw)
• Friday:  #FunFactFriday OR #FeelGoodFriday  OR #BehindTheScenes (created and posted by Elsabé Olivier)

As part of these hashtag posts, Nikki Haw also shares interesting book content and other news about Special Collections on a regular basis and Elsabé Olivier shares all other library news, visitors and events.

It is a huge responsibility to post on social media as we do not skip a single day and also act as back-ups for one another. It means you basically have a deadline every week – and some of us more than once a week!

But the hard work is paying off! Our Facebook page likes have increased from 2470 in December 2017 to 2969 by end of August 2018. We have also noticed increased engagement with our posts on all platforms, although the Facebook posts are more popular with students at this stage.

Comparison with other institutions such as UNISA Library, Unizulu Library, UFS Library, University of Cape Town Libraries and Stellenbosch Library, currently places the University of Pretoria’s engagement at the top! Two university libraries have more Facebook page likes than us: UNISA with 10.2 k and Unizulu with 3.3 K. but the UP Library has a steady increase and we have surpassed the University of Cape Town libraries (3 k), UFS Library (1.4k) and Stellenbosch Library (888).

These are some of the top Facebook posts for the period May to August 2018 – we think it is pretty amazing that we have reached 6 k people with one post!

One of the top #MondayMotivation posts with a reach of 4,259 people!

One of the top #TuesdaySelfie posts in which we focus on students making use of the library with a reach of 2,328 people – which indicates that faculty libraries should please participate and share images:

One of the top #WednesdayWisdom posts in which we share general library information with a reach of 1,512

One of the top #ThrowbackThursday posts with a reach of 2,240 people:

One of the top #FeelGoodFriday posts with a reach of 1,286 people:

Thanks to my dedicated team and let me know if you want to become part of this dynamic team, or contribute content!