Social media presence is becoming an increasingly important and efficient tool for communicating, marketing, and client interaction for all organisations, including information organisations (Yellow, 2020). While Facebook is the most accessed and utilised social media tool, micro-blogging platform, Twitter, is becoming more proliferate with organisations (Yellow, 2020).

This is why I have decided that this week we will do a quick exploration of two very prominent information organisations and their Twitter online presence.

The two organisations chosen for this exploration are the Library of Congress (LOC) – based in Washington DC, United States and currently the largest library in the world (LOC, n.d.) – and the National Archives of Australia – an Australian federal agency that collates and preserves records of Australian government decisions. These are very similar organisations in the information and collections they preserve – largely government records and historical research and documents – and their primary patron audience – researchers and those interested in national history. But does their Twitter media profiles reflect this and do they continue this similarity in content and reach?

Overall, the two profiles present very similar content. Both LOC and NAA publish information regarding organisation events and highlighting parts of their collection, often in line with various historical events or points of interest. In addition, both accounts publish primarily original content, with the only retweets found on either account being posts that either mention the organisation or were posted by more specific branches/accounts of the overall organisation (for example, LOC retweeted the Law Library of Congress).

Something that I found interesting was that, while both accounts often share historical information and collection items (something that is relevant to the audiences identified earlier), the way in which they link back to their own collections differs. As seen in the screenshots below, LOC links these types of posts back to their digital collection, using an embedded URL. This is something that makes it incredibly easy for users to engage and follow up with if the content is of interest. While NAA also provides collection information about what they shared, they don’t provide any similarly easy follow-up for users. This is despite the fact that the reference information provided does in fact correspond with items available in their digital collection.

While it is difficult to determine how much of the higher engagement garnered by LOC’s tweet is based on this particular element (other factors could include LOC overall higher follower count and audience, more interest in the actual content posted, more engagement due to the use of hashtags), it is something to certainly consider.

So, based on this quick exploration, are these two information organisations succeeding with their Twitter accounts?

This is something that is incredibly difficult to quantify – what does success on a social media site even look like. At face value, it appears that overall the engagement is quite low n both accounts, especially considering the number of followers and reach on each account – 1.2 million accounts currently follow the Library of Congress’ Twitter account, 23.5 thousand follow the National Archives of Australia. However, perhaps Twitter interaction isn’t the most valuable measure of success for these accounts. Other information that the public can not discern that are likely more useful includes the impressions or views that each posts garner, as well as the click-through rates to the organisations’ main websites and collections from these social media publications.

References.

Yellow. (2020a). Yellow Social Media Report 2020: Part One – Consumers. Retrieved from https://www.yellow.com.au/social-media-report/#download-report

Library of Congress (LOC). (n.d.). About the library. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/about/