Social media insights Sept – Dec 2019: We’re more social than ever before!

It has been a very busy year for us on social media! The library’s lively online presence has grown and adapted to the ever-changing online environment as a 24/7 tool for building relationships with our users and clients.

Keeping to the revised and improved social media strategy formulated by the Department of Library Service (DLS) Marketing Office, the official DLS social media pages have been decorated with relevant, original, engaging and high-quality library content (in both image and video format). To effectively create such content, our social media strategy is shaped around the need to connect with our library users.

This ‘connection’ is important so that we can inform users about relevant library information; promote our resources and services; find out more about our users; increase our visibility on campus; offer an additional way for our users to get in touch with us; and show the human side of our service. A popular way we did that was through our #LibraryBehindTheScenes posts where we featured individual staff members and described their duties, accompanying it with a few #FunFacts about their personal life.

The new dedication to the DLS’ social media platforms has proved to be working very well thus far. The social media committee members put a lot of effort in creating visually appealing content for Instagram in order to ultimately increase the library’s visibility on campus - and their efforts have certainly paid off! Instagram has seen a staggering 681% growth over the last year. Facebook has also continued to grow at a strong pace with a 48% growth in followers between January and December 2019. 

Everybody loves dogs! The top performing Facebook post between September and December with an overwhelming reach of 29,925 people and a total of 90 shares:

The top performing Instagram post with a reach of 931 people and a total of 88 likes:

Rugby fever and an excellent UP research paper resulted in the top performing tweet with 5,216 impressions and 82 post clicks:

It is very rewarding to see the growth we have experienced over the last year- both online, and as a team. A warm thank you to the social media contributors (Kelly Lievbenberg, Nikki Haw, Lidia Swart and Elsabé Olivier) for their creativity and commitment to their weekly posts. We trust that 2020 will be filled with many new events, developments and achievements in our library and we cannot wait to share all of those exciting details with you!

Make sure you keep up to date with the Department of Library Services by liking and following these pages:

• Facebook – UP Library Services
• Instagram –  @UPLibrary
• Twitter – @UPLibrary