Shut Up and Listen: How We Used Social Listening to Connect With Students and Build a Community

In social media, content creation is often king. The University of North Florida’s Thomas G. Carpenter Library has refocused its efforts away from original content in an effort to focus on listening and engagement. This practice has led the Carpenter Library to build a reliable, friendly, and helpful online community that has inspired other departments on campus to do the same. By monitoring keywords, hashtags, and geotags, library staff has kept tabs on what students have to say about the library’s various services, resources, spaces, employees, and more. Over the past 2 years, follower counts on Facebook and Twitter have almost doubled, as have engagements such as likes and shares. This presentation will share a variety of exchanges and informal data points that have been generated by using social listening, how other libraries can easily follow suit, and ways in which the Carpenter Library plans to move forward