Using social media to promote your digital collections

Promoting your digital collections through social media can contribute to institutional strategies to:

Enhance reputation

Reputation for research, learning, teaching and more broadly as an institution is developed on a number of fronts ranging from impact measures to astute marketing and publicity. Most would agree that high profile collections can play a part in that mix, demonstrating scholarly tradition, worthy investment and learning opportunity, especially in the humanities.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by:

• Making the institution collections richly visible to the widest audience online
• Providing a vehicle for widely resonant press releases and associated social media
• Generating exposure through use in A-level teaching

Enrich teaching and learning

Universities are universally focused on opportunities to enhance student experience and success though enriching learning and teaching provision. Providers at all levels are looking for digital technologies to increase flexibility of mode, to enable personalisation and collaboration and to transform access to and contextualisation of resources.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by:

• Enriching course materials and open education resources
• Providing a window on the world of advanced study and the mechanics of scholarship
• Offering teachers new opportunities to animate their subject areas

Enable research

Research is measured through a broad suite of impact factors that are underpinned by the strengths of people and resources. In many disciplines, those assets are increasingly distributed and virtualised, with research groups operating across faculty, institutional and geographic boundaries. The availability of content in a digital environment supports the distributed academy, providing a platform for the individual and the community.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Offering flexibility of access in terms of location and time
• Linking scanned images with reusable text, lexical tools, metadata and commentary
• Applying advancing IT techniques to analysis and comparison of texts and data
• Providing a platform for interaction amongst scholars, linking commentary and debate directly to sources

Assist widening participation

Universities are strategically committed to widening participation across social and economic groupings in higher education for all levels (undergraduate degrees, postgraduate studies, continuing and professional education) and regardless of mode (ranging from full time to distance education and MOOCs).

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Showcasing attractive and original learning and research content to prospective students
• Enabling re-use, thus adding value to educational resources, not only for university use but also for schools and colleges
• Social media amplification that brings original digitised content to the attention of key interest groups, such as A level teachers or local interest groups

Offer economy of access

Alongside memory institutions, universities recognise the importance of providing access to unique texts and other assets of scholarly significance held in their special collections. However, supporting physical access is costly and inefficient for all parties. Whilst principally of interest to researchers in the institution, in the wider HE community and beyond, the potential for these assets to enrich the learning and teaching experience is increasingly recognised, especially if they can be readily accessed in digital form.

Digitised content can make a strong contribution to these objectives by

• Alleviating pressures on curators to accommodate visiting scholars
• Saving visiting costs to the researcher or student, with resulting environmental benefits
• Opening up resources to students who would be unlikely to access the originals
   

The global pandemic of 2020-2021 showed how digital access to collections can suddenly and unexpectedly become essential when onsite access for users is not possible for some reason.

Promoting your digital collections through social media will help those who:

Use a general search engine to find content

Students at all levels, teachers and researchers report making use of general search engines to locate resources. Google is most often cited but others are used. Many students at undergraduate level report that they go no further than the first page of search engine results, and often no further than any Wikipedia entry highlighted. More advanced students and researchers will often use the search engine as the first stage of a more extensive discovery process.

Find content on recommendation from teachers

Students at all levels look for recommendations from teachers to guide them towards resources. These can be either through course reading lists or in the form of recommendations made in class or in a one-to-one discussion. When searching for resources to recommend, teachers tend to rely on their own specialist knowledge of the field, but may use library catalogues or online databases to check they have not missed anything relevant.

Find content by following experts

Students and researchers who are becoming familiar with their field of interest recognise the value of identifying and following experts. Establishing who are experts and finding their publications is seen as a good way to enter into a new topic of research. An overview article or chapter written by a subject expert is seen as an excellent starting point for further exploration. When preparing to teach courses staff are also likely to look for relevant courses taught by other experts for examples and to compare approaches.

Use online social tools to find content

Students and researchers use online social tools to form peer communities in which information on resources will be exchanged. Most used are e-mail lists, writing personal and shared blogs, and tracking relevant blogs, often through RSS feeds. A few report use of Twitter for this purpose, but Facebook is not mentioned. Students are more likely to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a way of sharing resources where this forms part of the way they keep in touch with peers and classmates.

In 2018 Jisc commissioned Sero HE to interview academics who were actively engaging with digital archival collection in learning, teaching and research.

From embedding digital archival collections into the curriculum, to creating open educational resources to support students and researchers, to using digital tools to help students develop better skills of reflection analysis and evaluation, these case studies demonstrate the variety and depth of interaction with digital media in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom.

See the list of case studies.

Since the launch of this guide in 2014, Jisc has worked with UK higher education academics and librarians to highlight resource discovery and the use of digital collections.

The audio and written case studies created between 2014 and 2017 provide valuable insights into the methods used by academics and librarians to showcase digital collections.

See the list of case studies.

• The University of Birmingham has published their ‘special collections’ of images on Flickr, delivering over 2 million views since they launched in 2012
• The Imperial War Museum publishes images from its digital collection on HistoryPin, allowing users to find the location of the images on a map

A simple measure would be to calculate the audiences you are able to reach and are actually reaching through the services you have chosen to use. Many websites provide usage statistics which make it easy to see how many people have engaged with your content.

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to understand changes in traffic to your site as a result of republishing content on popular web services:

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Resources for measuring the impact:

• Explore Twitter analytics
• Culture24’s Social Media Framework

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• Knowledge of rights and licensing
• Programming skills
• Experience of working with APIs

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• Create a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) to monitor Twitter search results
• Use NodeXL to analyse data from applications including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube
• Neatline visualises content from OMEKA collections
• Google Charts offers multiple options to visualise data
• VisualEyes creates timelines and visualisations from content such as maps and images
• The Internet Project from Pew Research provides a variety of reports on webtrends - including 'Social media use in 2021'
• The Digital Engagement Framework provides advice and mechanisms to effectively engage with your audiences

• The National Library of Scotland has used the hashtag #Talking1980s to connect to their 'Back to the future: 1979-1989' website
• Tate Modern used the short and simple hashtag #Picasso1932 to highlight a seminal period in the career of Pablo Picasso

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to understand user engagement with your content through hashtags:

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience
• Knowledge of rights and licensing
• Programming skills
• Experience of working with APIs

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• Explore Twitter analytics
• Create a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) to monitor Twitter search results
• Use NodeXL to analyse data from applications including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube
• Neatline visualises content from OMEKA collections
• Google Charts offers multiple options to visualise data
• VisualEyes creates timelines and visualisations from content such as maps and images
• Culture24’s Social Media Framework

• Adam Koszary reflects on his approach to the social media at The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and the effect one simple tweet had on followers and likes for their Twitter account
• Royal Academy uses #Radailydoodle to engage people with its Twitter account

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to understand the impact of your social media presence:

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Other resources that will help you measure the impact of your social media presence:

• Explore Twitter analytics
• Create a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) to monitor Twitter search results
• Use NodeXL to analyse data from applications including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube
• Neatline visualises content from OMEKA collections
• Google Charts offers multiple options to visualise data
• VisualEyes creates timelines and visualisations from content such as maps and images
• Culture24’s Social Media Framework

Skills and knowledge required

• Experience of social media management

Cost

• £££££ - continuous investment required

Resources

• The role of social media librarians in an academic context
• Reflections on tackling the digital engagement challenge from the Museum of English Rural life (MERL)

• The British Library takes advantage of the built in options on Flickr that help users share its images on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest
• The Rijksmuseum has included buttons for Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter sharing for each work in its collection

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to see the impact of using share buttons in your collection:

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Other resources that will help you measure the impact of using share buttons:

• Explore Twitter analytics
• Create a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) to monitor Twitter search results
• Use NodeXL to analyse data from applications including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube
• Culture24’s Social Media Framework

Skills and knowledge required

• Experience of web development

Cost

• £££££ - occasional investment required

• Archives Hub post a monthly feature highlighting archives around a theme or topic
• The National Library of Scotland blog features input from staff and guest bloggers
• The Bodleian offers a number of engaging blog channels to explore its collections

There are a number of tools that will allow you to effectively use web analytics to see the impact of writing a blog about your collection

• Get started with Google Analytics Academy Courses
• Introduction to Google Analytics Segments

Other resources that will help you measure the impact of your blog are:

• Explore Twitter analytics
• Create a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) to monitor Twitter search results
• Google Charts offers multiple options to visualise data
• Culture24’s Social Media Framework

Skills and knowledge required

• Expertise in the subject matter or curation experience

Cost

• ££ - continuous investment required