This post is meant to outline my social media strategy for sharing my course project (which is a textual analysis of books about Detroit digitized by Hathitrust), but I do have to say that I don’t know if I want to share it as of right now. I ran the algorithms within Hathitrust and am not wild about the results; that is, I don’t think they actually reveal anything interesting, although I will take a closer look over the next week.
These are the social media strategies I developed for different, but sometimes overlapping, groups that I belong to (or sort of belong to, in the second instance). I chose the platforms I did because I already have a presence on those platforms and am connected to those groups via those platforms. For academic librarians and digital humanities librarians and scholars, Twitter does seem to be the preferred social media platform. I am more personally connected to Detroit scholars and activists, which is why I would try to reach them through Facebook. In all three cases, I would maybe consider asking someone prominent in those groups to boost the signal, as it were.
I did not include other social media platforms because I do not have a presence on them and frankly, it is a lot of work to build a presence and then to interact through numerous social media platforms. Some platforms – like Instagram – don’t seem particularly appropriate, since my project will incorporate a fair amount of text in addition to some images.
Social media strategies
Audience: Academic librarians
Platform: Twitter
Messages: The message for this group would probably be primarily an announcement, since it may or may not be something they’re actually professionally interested in.
Measure: I would measure the success of this via favorites, replies, and retweets and also possibly via analytics on my online portfolio.
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Audience: Digital humanities librarians and scholars
Platform: Twitter
Messages: The message for this group would be more about soliciting feedback and initiating discussion about the project.
Measure: I would measure the success of this through conversations (which could be replies on Twitter) and comments on the portfolio post.
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Audience: Detroit scholars/activists
Platform: Facebook
Messages: This would be a combination of the previous two messages: an announcement, but also looking for feedback about the project from the perspective of people less interested in digital humanities per se and more interested in Detroit.
Measure: I would measure the success of this primarily through conversations on Facebook and the portfolio post, but would also consider likes and shares on Facebook and analytics from my portfolio.
