2019 Pacific Northwest Library Association Conference

As academic librarians become more comfortable with utilizing social media, Instagram has emerged as a favored platform to promote their library’s resources and connect with patrons. While there have been multiple techniques documented to measure the success of a library’s Instagram posts—through counts of followers, likes, comments, and views—there is little guidance on what features and content of library Instagram posts will produce successful results. We propose that a first step forward to remedy this lack of guidance is through analyzing how libraries are currently using Instagram to connect with their campus communities and promote their services and events. To accomplish this analysis, we collected and studied the Instagram posts of a group of twelve land-grant university libraries, categorizing each post’s content according to a coding schema and determining the engagement it received from the library’s Instagram followers. We will present the results of our investigation and offer a way forward for future research into best practices for academic library Instagram content.