Talk delivered by Jennifer (Jenni) Hamilton, PhD Candidate at the University of Strathclyde

1. Social Media Use and
Interactions of National Libraries
Developing a framework to analyse comments
Jennifer (Jenni) Hamilton, University of Strathclyde
Supervised by Dr Diane Pennington

2. Overall project aims
To answer research questions
1. In what ways do national libraries use Twitter and Facebook?
2. How can user engagement be analysed beyond response
numbers?
3. In what ways how do social media users respond to posts by
national libraries?
3a. how do national libraries interact with these user responses?

3. Developing the method
• Tried a lot of different approaches to see if could understand
comments better
• Not a great fit as hard to capture complexity of responses
• Thematic discourse analysis by Potter and Wetherell allows for asking
questions of the text to be analysed
• These questions are answered by looking at the language people use to get
their thoughts across eg positive or negative language, emotional terms
POTTER, J. & WETHERELL, M. 1987. Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour, Sage.

4. Initial questions
• who or what the comments were responding to
• was the response relevant to the post
• was there any clear emotions influencing the commenter
• were there discernible motivations for responding
• was there any context that could colour these responses
• was there anything else that they were thinking

5. Final framework
1. What is the comment responding to?
2. Does the comment match the content of the post?
3. What emotions or motivations for responding are present?
4. Is there any context to the comment?
5. Is there anything else that affects how the comment could be interpreted?

6. Results
• What is the comment responding to?
• Content, library, other users, comment above, tagging content, content and
library
• Does the comment match the content of the post?
• Yes, no, partially

7. Results 2
• What emotions or motivations for responding are present?
• Like content, thought user tagged would find it interesting, admiration of
person in content, gratitude, sharing relevant memory, moved by content,
answering question in post, suggestion from friend, asking a question etc.
• Context
• Number of likes, user tagged responded, responded to by library, received no
public answer, same commenter as above
• Anything else
• Couldn’t decipher acronym, unsure if replying to correct post

8. Takeaways
• Framework provides more insight to comments regardless of length
• Provides feedback for why content resonates with social media users
• Shows patterns in behaviour around responding to comments
• Still a new method so more testing would be beneficial
• Method relies on public data so some limitation
• Overall, framework is flexible to work with any comments on social
media posts while still being consistent and rigorous.

9. Thanks for listening
jennifer.hamilton@strath.ac.uk