Research
Article
Delivering Information Literacy via Facebook: Here
Comes the Spinach!
A.
F. Tyson
Subject
Librarian, Learning Teaching & Research
University
of Canterbury
Christchurch,
Canterbury, New Zealand
Email:
fiona.tyson@canterbury.ac.nz
Anton
Angelo
Research
Data Coordinator, Learning Teaching & Research
University
of Canterbury
Christchurch,
Canterbury, New Zealand
Email:
anton.angelo@canterbury.ac.nz
Brian
McElwaine
Resource
Discovery Manager, Access and Collections
University
of Canterbury
Christchurch,
Canterbury, New Zealand
Email:
brian.mcelwaine@canterbury.ac.nz
Kiera
Tauro
Subject
Librarian, Learning Teaching & Research
University
of Canterbury
Christchurch,
Canterbury, New Zealand
Email:
kiera.tauro@canterbury.ac.nz
Received: 20 Nov. 2018 Accepted:
18 Apr.
2019
2019 Tyson,
Angelo, McElwaine, and Tauro. This is an Open Access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share
Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
Abstract
Objective –
Information literacy (IL) skills are critical to undergraduate student success
and yet not all students receive equal amounts of curriculum-integrated IL
instruction. This study investigated whether Facebook could be employed by
libraries as an additional method of delivering IL content to students. To test
whether students would engage with IL content provided via a library Facebook
page, this study compared the engagement (measured by Facebook’s reach and
engagement metrics) with IL content to the library’s normal marketing content.
Methods – We
ran a two-part intervention using the University of Canterbury Library’s
Facebook page. We created content to help students find, interpret, and
reference resources, and measured their reception using Facebook’s metrics. Our
first intervention focused on specific courses and mentioned courses by name
through hashtagging, while our second intervention targeted peak assessment
times during the semester. Statistics on each post’s reach and engagement were
collected from Facebook’s analytics.
Results –
Students chose to engage with posts on the library Facebook page that contain
IL content more than the normal library marketing-related content. Including
course-specific identifiers (hashtags) and tagging student clubs and societies
in the post further increased engagement. Reach was increased when student
clubs and societies shared our content with their followers.
Conclusion –
This intervention found that students engaged more with IL content than with
general library posts on Facebook. Course-targeted interventions were more
successful in engaging students than generic IL content, with timeliness,
specificity, and community being important factors in building student
engagement. This demonstrates that academic libraries can use Facebook for more
than just promotional purposes and offers a potential new channel for
delivering IL content.
Introduction
Students
are increasingly using social media to communicate, disseminate information,
and learn about the world around them. They tailor their online experience so
that the information they are interested in comes to them with no searching
required. At the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the Library wanted to
see if it was possible to leverage a social media platform to deliver
information literacy (IL) content in a way that was convenient and useful to
undergraduate students.
Undergraduate
student success is positively associated with library use and the development
of IL skills (Catalano & Phillips, 2016; Soria, Fransen, & Nackerud,
2014, 2017). This project sought to determine to what extent students would
engage with IL content from a library Facebook page. Rather than making
students come to us, we would go to them and give them tools they could use to
successfully complete assignments. Prior to the intervention, the library had a
Facebook page with 1921 followers, and this, along with the knowledge that
Facebook worked well for the format of the content we intended to post, gave us
a place to start.
We
separated our approach into two distinct parts to identify the factors that
influenced engagement. In Semester One of 2017 we targeted specific large
undergraduate courses, and using the course syllabi, posted relevant IL content
timed to correspond to important assessments in each course. We also engaged
with relevant student societies and other University Facebook groups by tagging
them in our posts. In Semester Two, we were less specific with our approach and
posted general IL content without targeting specific cohorts.
Literature Review
Much
has been written about the potential uses of Facebook by academic libraries,
but a scan of the literature suggests that libraries are still conservative in
their use of social media. The literature is still largely instructional,
providing information on how to use Facebook and suggesting best practice
guidelines for developing an institutional page (Burkhardt, 2010; Mack, Behler,
Roberts, & Rimland, 2007; Solomon, 2013; Wright Joe, 2015). Perhaps not
surprisingly, recent content analyses of Facebook in academic libraries have
found a focus on collection promotion and building connections between students
and the library (Al-Daihani & Abrahams, 2018; Harrison, Burress, Velasquez,
& Schreiner, 2017; Palmer, 2014; Phillips, 2011; Zhu, 2016). A 2017
analysis of six American academic library social media pages found three main
themes: “making community connections”, “creating an inviting environment”, and
“providing content” (Harrison et al., 2017, p. 254), with “content” defined as
posts relating to archives, collections, and exhibits. While two early studies
indicate potential for offering reference services via Facebook (Click &
Petit, 2010; Mack et al., 2007), academic libraries continue to make “quite
limited use” of Facebook with the platform used as a marketing tool or
loudspeaker rather than for interaction or service provision (Aharony, 2012, p.
369).
Other
disciplines have begun to explore more innovative uses of Facebook, including
Facebook-based instruction. After finding that students already use social
media networks such as Facebook to converse with their classmates regarding
courses and assessment (Donlan, 2014; Towner & Lego Muñoz, 2011),
researchers investigated the use of Facebook for formal learning, including
language learning (Annamalai, 2016; Leier, 2017; Omar, Embi, & Yunus,
2012), tourism education (Chen, 2018), and sport coaching (Donlan, 2014). They
found that formally assessed Facebook activities were not well-received by
students, who struggled to maintain the formal strictures of educational
assessment, such as appropriate language and deadlines, on an informal platform
(González-Ramírez, Gascó, & Taverner, 2015; Leier, 2017). In addition,
students may not wish to engage with their lecturers on Facebook
(González-Ramírez et al., 2015), or only passively interacted with the Facebook
page/group in question (Chugh & Ruhi, 2018). However, students reported
appreciating being able to access academic material via Facebook
(González-Ramírez et al., 2015), being able to access the resources and support
posted on Facebook groups (Chen, 2018), and being able to use Facebook to
access and post links (Donlan, 2014). The dominant finding in the literature is
that Facebook is a useful platform for “enhancing learning, increasing
participation and engagement, content dissemination, improving pedagogy and
information sharing” (Chugh & Ruhi, 2018, p. 613).
The
finding that using Facebook for informal learning, rather than formal learning,
is better received by students raises the question of how to measure impact.
While the use of formal assessment allows for student feedback or grade
analysis from an identifiable student cohort, informal learning requires
different metrics. Some studies of formal learning have used Facebook metrics
to analyse student behaviour on the Facebook page, in addition to qualitative
measures (Donlan, 2014; Leier, 2017). Core Facebook metrics for each post on a
Facebook page include the number of likes (“comparable to a non-committal smile
or a nod at something you like or that you were interested in”, Mauda &
Kalman, 2016, p. 3527), shares (“where the user is suggesting to his or her own
circle of friends to engage with a certain message”, p. 3527), and comments
(“comparable to expressing an opinion about a brand or an organization, or
about their message”, p. 3527). Other less visible engagement measures are the
number of times visitors clicked on links within posts or viewed images/videos
(Mauda & Kalman, 2016). Donlan (2014), in particular, noted that Facebook
metrics are the best proxy for student use when participation is optional and
cannot be systematically tested in any other way.
Thus
far, library use of Facebook as a platform for developing students’ IL skills
has not been reported. Yet there is a strong body of literature on using
Facebook as a pedagogical tool within traditional IL instruction settings. For
example, the use of keywords and controlled vocabularies in databases has been
compared to social practices such as tagging on Facebook; in addition,
information-seeking behaviours fostered on the platform can be analogized to
database searching (Bobish, 2011; Click & Petit, 2010; Godwin, 2009; Witek
& Grettano, 2012). Teaching IL with reference to Facebook conventions indicates
an awareness on the part of academic librarians that most students use Facebook
(Akcaoglu & Bowman, 2016; Chugh & Ruhi, 2018). The popularity of
Facebook in New Zealand is no different, with Facebook the dominant social
media platform and 75% of New Zealanders visiting Facebook at least monthly
(Nielsen, 2016, pp. 30-31).
While
an early study found that students felt hesitant about communicating with
library staff on Facebook (Chu & Meulemans, 2008), a more recent study
found that students ranked Facebook as their preferred social media platform
for communications from the library (Winn, Groenendyk, & Rivosecchi, 2015).
This is indicative of how Facebook has become a default platform for everyday
communication. Furthermore, students increasingly use social media for
information seeking. A review of seven studies of secondary and tertiary
students’ use of social media found that social media “assist[ed] users in
their request for information in combination with powerful search engines”,
with convenience being a major contributor to the use of social media
(Hyldegård, 2014, p. 113). The research indicates that the role of Facebook in
students’ lives has been evolving, but academic libraries’ use of Facebook has
not, raising the question of how academic libraries can use Facebook to better
engage with students and share educational content.
Aims
The
aim of this project was to determine to what extent students will choose to
engage with IL content from a library Facebook page. We sought to address the
practical problem of how to reach students outside of traditional library
services and identified Facebook as a potential platform for doing so. In
particular, we wanted to provide undergraduate students with IL tools that
would help them succeed at tertiary level study, while also building their
awareness of the role the library plays in supporting their study.
Methods
Preparation
Facebook
was chosen as the social media platform for delivering targeted content to
students for the following reasons:
1.
Our
library already had a modest established audience of 1921 Facebook followers.
Based on Facebook demographics, the majority of our audience was aged 18-34,
and a large percentage had a location of Christchurch, leading to the
assumption that a sizeable proportion of our followers were current University
of Canterbury students.
2.
Some
platforms were discounted as impractical. For example, Snapchat was not
suitable because of the ephemeral nature of posts on that platform, and Twitter
was considered too brief and too removed from our target undergraduate
audience.
3.
Facebook
facilitated posting content in an appropriate format more easily than other
platforms.
4.
The
literature indicated that more students would have a Facebook account than any
other social media account (Nielsen, 2016).
5.
Some
groups that we hoped to work with, such as University of Canterbury’s student
engineering society, maintained a presence on Facebook.
Having
determined that we wanted to deliver IL content via Facebook, we developed the
following working definition of the term:
Content that
helps students search for, locate, evaluate and correctly reference information
for their assignments.
Adapted
from The Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework:
Principles, Standards and Practice (Bundy, 2004), this definition captures
the specific information literacy skills we could reasonably deliver on this
particular platform.
Located in Christchurch, New Zealand, the University
of Canterbury is a research and teaching university, with 11 subjects ranked in
the top 200 QS World University Rankings (University of Canterbury, n.d.). Undergraduate students are the
dominant student group at the University of Canterbury, with 8810 undergraduate
students (55% of the student population) in 2017 (Education Counts, 2017, tab
ENR.30). It was hypothesized that by targeting large undergraduate classes in
Semester One, we could reach the maximum number of students with each message
(and avoid alienating othersers
with posts targeted at small cohorts). These large classes typically were in
students’ first year of study, as new students were the most likely to benefit
from the bite-sized IL content we could provide via Facebook.
Prior
to the start of the semester, we reached out to subject librarians and asked if
they knew of any large-scale first year classes in their areas that were suited
to having IL instruction delivered via Facebook. After choosing five classes
that seemed suitable, the subject librarians contacted lecturers to ensure that
they would be happy to direct their students to the library Facebook page. We
were then given the syllabus for the course, and we planned our posts based on
the individual course schedules so they included information that was known to
be specifically useful for a forthcoming assessment. There was no further
contact with lecturers past the initial green light for posting the content on
Facebook, but many were supportive of our pilot program and promoted our
Facebook page to their students, either in class or by sharing posts on
Facebook.
Once
suitable cohorts were identified, we used the University of Canterbury
Students’ Association website to identify appropriate student clubs to tag in
our posts. With these pieces in place, a posting schedule was produced,
detailing what would be written, by whom and when, and who we would tag in our
posts to maximize the number of students reached. Posts were also hashtagged
with the appropriate course code so students could readily identify them.1
Semester
Two posts were targeted at the general student population. They still contained
IL content but were not aimed at a particular cohort or discipline. It was
decided that we would create content based on the general assessment schedule
for the university. While this was not a written schedule, we know based on
experience that many courses have assignments, midterms, and exams at similar
points throughout the semester, and that students all have similar needs at
these times. For example, we know that at the beginning of the semester,
students need to know how to find their textbooks in the library, whereas just
before the midterm break lots of essays are due and APA referencing resources
are useful. We wanted to determine whether our posts generated engagement
because the content was generally useful, or because the content was well
targeted. Since we were not targeting specific cohorts, we did not tag student
clubs and other University pages in the posts or contact course coordinators. A
posting schedule was also created for Semester Two, but it only detailed what
would be written, by whom and when. We also tagged all our posts with the
hashtag #DeadlinesAreComing, a riff on the popular “Winter is Coming” tagline
from the Game of Thrones TV and book series. This hashtag could be clicked on,
or searched by students so that all our IL posts for that semester would be
viewable.
Posting
We
focused on delivering bite-sized chunks of information that could be easily
conveyed through short posts or infographics. Content included advertising
just-in-time drop-in sessions focused on particular assignments, demonstrating
specific IL skills (such as searching a web-scale discovery tool; see Figure 1
for an example), and promoting specific resources. Due to the relatively
ephemeral nature of Facebook posts, we did not spend a lot of time on the
creation of these posts, choosing instead to prioritize content over style.
Figure 1
Example of an
intervention post regarding how to use the library’s web-scale discovery tool.
Intervention Posts and Non-Intervention Posts
All
posts that were designed as part of this project are referred to as
“intervention posts.” During the current study, University of Canterbury
library staff continued to create posts about opening hours, events, and other
promotional material. These posts were distinct from those that contained IL
content, and the statistics from these posts formed the “control group” against
which the success of our IL posts would be judged. We divided our total
population of Facebook posts over the study’s time period into intervention
posts and non-intervention posts.
·
Intervention Posts: These
posts to Facebook represent those developed as part of the study. They
contained IL content developed by the research team. In Semester One, there
were 38 intervention posts, 11 of which tagged student groups. In Semester Two,
there were 30 intervention posts, all without tagging. A post was “tagged” when
the intervention included an internal Facebook link to that group. It alerted
the group’s members that content relevant to them had been posted, and provided
an opportunity for that group to share the post to their own followers.
·
Non-Intervention Posts:
All library posts that were not developed by the research team for the purpose
of delivering IL material are considered to be non-intervention posts. In
Semester One, there were 404 non-intervention posts, and in Semester Two there
were 280.
All
four authors crafted posts, so it was important to develop a consistent style
and use of images and video. We wanted to have a generally informal style
sprinkled with pop culture references and memes, in part to be consistent with
students’ expectations of the platform, and partly because we believed that
students would respond better to this than to a more formal approach. Our most
social media-savvy team members vetted and edited our posts, which served to
ensure consistency and to mitigate the risks of using inappropriate memes or
images. This was typically just a quick glance over the posts to ensure that
tone and content were appropriate for both the platform and the audience. There
is a genuine risk attached to using cultural references and memes without fully
understanding them, and it is important to be aware of the nuances of how
specific memes are used before posting to help manage risk.
Metrics
The
final work in the preparation stage of the project was to consider the tools we
would use to assess the impact of the IL posts. This requires a few definitions
surrounding the metrics available on Facebook, which are not always transparent.
·
Reach: The number of people
who had any content from a page or post, or about the page or post, enter their
newsfeed (“What’s the difference between page views,
reach and impressions?” n.d.). It can be seen as a measure of how widely
a message has been disseminated.
·
Engagement: The number of actions
whereby users “engaged” with the content of a post or page (“Post engagement,”
n.d.). Watching a video, clicking a link, liking, commenting, sharing, etc.,
all constitute engagement. It can be seen as a measure of how interesting or
useful the content is to the user, since most users are not motivated to
“engage” with content that does not have value to them.
·
Paid vs. Organic: For most of
Facebook’s metrics, a distinction is made between paid and organic numbers.
Paid numbers have arisen from financial investment in advertising with
Facebook. Organic numbers are those that have arisen without being paid for
(“What’s the difference between organic, paid and
post reach?” 2018). As there was no budget for this project, all numbers
presented in this study are organic.
Raw
data was extracted from Facebook at the end of each semester: June 12, 2017 and
November 9, 2017, via Facebook’s “Insights” function. It has been reported that
Facebook posts attract the majority of their engagement within 24 hours of
posting, a phenomenon we also observed in the course of this study (Ayres,
n.d.). Therefore, the timing of data collection will not have impacted
the measures of engagement.
Analysis of Results
We
used reach and engagement as a proxy measure for success of the intervention
and as an indication of the value students were placing on the content, as we
could not directly measure the effectiveness of instruction. We hypothesized
that students would engage more with content that was useful to them and that
reach may also correlate with topics of potential interest. We decided to
compare intervention posts with the general posts produced by the library,
believing that our best chance of demonstrating value lay in comparing reach
and engagement between non-intervention and intervention posts.
Results
Targeting individual courses and tagging relevant student clubs
and University groups in posts resulted in greater median engagement and reach
than other posts on our page.
Table 1 shows the reach that the University of Canterbury library
Facebook page posts had during Semester One and Semester Two in 2017. Semester One intervention posts reached a median of 1012 and a
mean of 1106 people, compared to a median of 464 and mean of 613 people reached
with the non-intervention posts during the same period. Posts that were part of
the intervention in Semester Two were less successful and reached a median of
530 and a mean of 531 people, compared to a median reach of 521 and a mean of
668 for non-intervention posts. Overall, when looking at the median numbers,
intervention posts in Semester One reached 118% more people than
non-intervention posts, which is significantly higher than in Semester Two,
when intervention posts reached only 2% more people.
Table
1
Comparison
of Reach between Intervention and Non-Intervention Posts in Semesters One and
Two
|
Semester
One
|
Semester
Two
|
|
Intervention Posts
(n = 38)
|
Non-Intervention Posts
(n = 404)
|
Percent Change
|
Intervention Posts
(n = 30)
|
Non- Intervention Posts
(n = 280)
|
Percent Change
|
|
Median
|
1012
|
464
|
+118%
|
530
|
521
|
+2%
|
|
Mean
|
1106
|
613
|
+66%
|
531
|
668
|
-21%
|
Figure 2 shows a comparison between Semester One intervention
posts and Semester One non-intervention posts. There was greater variance among
non-intervention posts, and Semester One intervention posts reached a
considerably greater readership than non-intervention posts.
Figure 2
Semester One Reach:
intervention posts vs. non-intervention posts. Outliers have been removed to
improve the readability of the figure.
Figure 3 shows reach figures for all posts, intervention and
non-intervention, for both
semesters. In Semester Two, where specific groups were not
targeted, there was little difference between the reach of intervention and
non-intervention posts. Viewing the data this way shows that the Semester One
targeted posts performed above all other groups.
Figure 3
Semester One and Semester
Two Reach comparison. Outliers have been removed to improve the readability of
the figure.
Table 2 shows the median and
mean engagements per post. Intervention posts in Semester One had a greater
mean and median rate of engagement than non-intervention posts from both
semesters, as well as intervention posts in Semester Two. In Semester One,
intervention posts had a 136% higher median engagement rate than
non-intervention posts, while in Semester Two there was only a 67% increase in
engagement between intervention and non-intervention posts.
Table 2
Comparison of Engagement between Intervention and Non-Intervention
Posts in Semesters One and Two
|
Semester One
|
Semester Two
|
|
Intervention Posts
(n = 38)
|
Non-Intervention Posts
(n = 404)
|
Percent
Change
|
Intervention Posts
(n = 30)
|
Non- Intervention Posts
(n = 280)
|
Percent
Change
|
|
Median
|
26
|
11
|
+136%
|
15
|
9
|
+67%
|
|
Mean
|
42
|
20
|
+110%
|
19
|
24
|
−21%
|
Figure 4 shows a comparison of intervention posts and
non-intervention posts across both semesters.
Semester One intervention posts received
greater engagement than other post types, with Semester Two intervention posts
performing similarly to non-intervention posts in terms of engagement.
Figure 4
Semester One and Semester Two engagement: intervention posts vs.
non-intervention posts. Outliers have been removed to improve the readability
of the figure.
Table
3 indicates posts that tagged student clubs showed higher reach and engagement.
Intervention posts where a club was tagged reached a median of
1262 people, compared to a median of 1012 for all intervention posts. The mean
reach for the tagged intervention posts was 1803, a substantial increase from
the 1106 people reached for all intervention posts. Engagement on posts where
we tagged student groups was also greater; the median engagement for
intervention posts with clubs tagged was 46, and only 26 for all intervention
posts.
There was one IL post that had such large reach and engagement
that it needed to be looked at more closely. Figure 5 shows the median level of
engagement a typical project post received, compared to that of this outlier
post. During Semester One, stage one engineering students are required to
complete an assignment that requires use of library resources. The engineering
Subject Librarians created a LibGuide that contained information and materials
that could help students complete their assignment. The week before the due
date, this guide was promoted on the University of Canterbury Library Facebook
page. Relevant student clubs and departments were tagged in the post, and it was shared by the Engineering student society
and the College of Engineering Facebook pages, eventually reaching 5159 people.
There were 29 comments on the post, many of which were students tagging their
friends to ensure they would see it. There were also instances of
non-engineering students tagging friends or family members who were in the
engineering course. Even if the post was not directly relevant to the
individual, they were tagging someone for whom it would be useful to ensure
that they would not miss it. One hundred thirty-one people clicked on the link
to the subject guide, and Facebook recorded 456 “other clicks” (which are
clicks not on the post content, but on the institutional page or a “see more”
link). This post had 410% increased reach and 1538% increased engagement, compared
to the median for all intervention posts.
Table 3
Comparison of Reach and Engagement between Intervention Posts and
Intervention Posts that Tagged Clubs
|
REACH
|
Intervention Posts - Clubs Tagged (n
=11)
|
Intervention Posts
(n = 38)
|
|
Median
|
1262
|
1012
|
|
Mean
|
1803
|
1106
|
|
ENGAGEMENT
|
Intervention Posts - Clubs Tagged (n
=11)
|
Intervention Posts
(n =38)
|
|
Median
|
46
|
26
|
|
Mean
|
88
|
42
|
Figure 5
Engagement for outlier post
compared with non-intervention, intervention, and tagged intervention posts in
Semester One.
Discussion
Our Facebook followers clicked on, liked, and shared posts we
describe as “spinach”—content that is informative rather than exciting—more
than the content we normally post to develop community, market our services,
and entertain. We propose that two factors influence the extent to which
students pay attention to posts with IL content: timeliness and specificity,
and community.
Figure 6
A student club sharing an intervention post on their Facebook
page.
Figure
7
A
complimentary letter regarding the library’s Facebook page published in the
student magazine.
Timeliness and Specificity
In Semester One, we targeted particular student courses with
timely content; in Semester Two, we targeted our content at peak assessment
times for undergraduate students as a whole. The reach of the Semester Two
posts was comparable to non-intervention posts, while Semester One posts had a
118% higher median reach than non-intervention posts. The fact that Semester
One posts had greater reach than Semester Two posts indicates that while
timeliness is important, it cannot easily be disentangled from specificity.
Providing IL content “just-in-time” while targeting cohorts’ specific IL needs
was the most effective way to improve reach to students. This is a more
labour-intensive means of providing IL content via Facebook, but it provides
increased reach.
Community
Positive community interaction with the intervention posts on
Facebook took two forms. First, student clubs and societies shared our posts
after they had been tagged. Second, broader communities of students’ friends
and colleagues shared posts on their personal Facebook timelines or tagged
friends into our posts in comments. When clubs were tagged in posts, our median
engagement increased by 77%.
We propose that tagging posts increased our reach beyond the
newsfeed of followers of our institutional page. In addition, the peer
recommendation implicit in a share adds authority to the content as the social
capital of the tagger is added to the message. While it is difficult to
quantify the effect of students tagging each other, it is not to be
underestimated. For example, Figure 6 shows a student society sharing a post
with their community with positive feedback.
An unanticipated benefit was building positive relationships
between the library and student clubs and societies. While we had some
trepidation about how they would react to being tagged in posts, not only did
they frequently re-share tagged posts, but we received feedback from clubs who
appreciated our attention and the exposure the library provided. Positive
feedback also came from unexpected places, such as a letter published in the
University of Canterbury student magazine (Figure 7). While only representative
of one student’s opinion, it indicates that Facebook can be an effective
platform for providing IL content.
Workload
In order for the project to have as little impact as possible on
existing staff workload, the materials we developed were deliberately informal,
making use of screenshots annotated with handwriting and post-it notes. Other
options, such as creating professional infographics or high production standard
videos were rejected on the grounds of cost and speed. We believe that students
responded well to the informal content and that investing more time or
resources would not guarantee a higher level of reach and engagement.
Limitations and Further Study
Our colleagues’ support of the library’s Facebook page may have
artificially raised our reach and engagements when they liked and shared posts.
We think the effect of this is minor in terms of evaluating the success of our
intervention because their engagement was equally spread over intervention and
non-intervention posts. Nonetheless, we would recommend that anyone replicating
this research may want to set a policy for their own colleagues to not like or
share their posts while they are testing the effect of their intervention.
While we believe we have shown that students have an appetite for
IL content on Facebook, we have not assessed whether students have improved IL
skills as a result of this intervention. Future studies could test a sample of
students before and after an intervention, or survey those that marked
assignments to see if the students demonstrated improved IL skills.
Potential confounding factors for this study include ways students
may have been drawn to our Facebook posts other than tagging. For example, a
suggestion from a tutor or lecturer to check them out, or coverage in student
media could have increased our reach.
Using Facebook to deliver a service could be seen as inequitable
since not all students use it. However, none of the IL content delivered via
Facebook was unique to this platform. The library offers numerous other portals
where this content can be accessed by any student; providing IL via Facebook
does not disadvantage any other users and in fact offers an opportunity to
reach students who may not have been reached through traditional library
channels.
Finally, consideration needs to be given to the Facebook algorithm
which determines the content of an individual’s feed; we have no control over
it, and cannot say whether it benefited or hindered us. Furthermore, Facebook
is constantly adjusting its algorithm with different goals than those of the
library, so directly replicating this study would be difficult. While we
believe Facebook is a valuable platform for providing IL content given the
pre-eminence of social media in students’ lives, it is important to acknowledge
that libraries relinquish an element of control in using this platform.
Conclusion
Students
responded positively to IL material delivered on Facebook, provided that it was
timely for assessment and targeted at specific groups. Under circumstances
where substantial, timely help is offered to a large cohort, this positive
response was further amplified. We interpret these increases, particularly in
engagement, to indicate that students perceived value in what was being
provided and that including the wider university social community amplified our
message and helped to build relationships.
The
effect was not apparent when specific student groups were not targeted. Under
these circumstances, there was little deviation from the performance of
non-intervention posts.
Our
results suggest that, given timely, relevant, and specific IL content, students
will engage with IL content on Facebook.
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