Professional development activity: Find, read and analyze a peer-reviewed journal article

Article: Understanding public libraries’ challenges, motivators, and perceptions toward the use of social media for marketing.

Website: https://www-emerald-com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LHT-11-2017-0237/full/html

Topic: Digital materials

Description of the activity

I recently read and analyzed an article titled “Understanding public libraries’ challenges, motivators, and perceptions toward using social media for marketing" (Choi. N,2018) during INF321. The topic of the article is Digital materials – social media. This article investigates the importance of social media for libraries and the challenges of marketing them.

Article Summary

The main topic of this article is public libraries and social media platforms. The purpose is to understand the current public library marketing use of social media platforms, the reasons for their use, operational issues, and their importance to marketing.
The study was conducted by a public library in the United States that conducted a nationwide online survey, using 470 responses for data analysis. Findings from the survey reveal challenges and motivations for public library use of social media also identify social media as an important marketing tool for public libraries, and use the findings as a guideline for future increases in social media usage.

Reflection

According to Rankin (2018) that marketing includes anticipating, reaching out, building connections, and meeting customer needs, libraries should be proactive in outreach efforts that rely on the experience of library staff for groups and groups that do not use the library or reading culture. Individuals make sales (p.16). So marketing is more than just advertising, promotion, or public relations.

Through this professional development activity, I not only learned how to do surveys and write research articles but was also inspired. It turns out that social media is the best platform for promotion activities at the moment because most young people now have their mobile phones around. There are three main reasons for using mobile phones: learning, gaming, social media, and using social media as a way for teens to share reading.

The article uses extensive literature to demonstrate that there are different libraries using social media for marketing and with good results. In addition, librarians were surveyed in 50 state libraries and the results were obtained(Choi. N,2018).
1)The reason for using social media for marketing is the influence of the environment and the same occupation
2) Facebook is the most popular marketing social media tool
3) The biggest challenge of social media marketing is the lack of professionals

Based on the above three results, I can formulate some marketing strategies to apply to my school library, such as opening a Facebook page and inviting all teachers and students to join, and inviting students to share their reading experience or promote books on the page. And Facebook has a chat feature that allows users to communicate directly with library staff through this feature.

Comparison of social media used by public libraries or school libraries in Hong Kong

Because public libraries need to promote externally, they also use other social media platforms in addition to Facebook, such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Compared to schools, which only need to be promoted to teachers, students, and parents. So school libraries only have Facebook and Instagram.

School libraries have fewer target users, they are easier to meet the needs of users than public libraries and use fewer people. In addition, public libraries will encounter some older people who do not use electronic products, so I think school libraries are easier to use social media as a marketing tool than public libraries.

References:

Choi, N., & Joo, S. (2018). Understanding public libraries’ challenges, motivators, and perceptions toward the use of social media for marketing. Library Hi Tech, 39(2), 352-367

Focus on page 16 in Rankin, C. (2018). Guidelines for Library Services to Children Aged 0-18. 2nd ed. IFLA Children and Young Adults Section. http://ifla.org/publications/node/67343?og=51 

Hong Kong public library. (2022). Hong Kong public library index. https://www.hkpl.gov.hk/en/index.html