The role of social media in the promotion of university libraries

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the types and frequency of social media tools' use in academic libraries to determine their developmental impact in Turkey. It involves 66 universities in the Marmara region in total – 24 (or 35%) are public and 42 (or 65%) are private - and only 60 of them have libraries.This data was collected by reviewing the libraries' web pages and analyzing them with some statistical tests via MS Excel. The results revealed that, in the Marmara region, 64% of libraries in private universities and 36% of libraries in public universities use social media tools. While 95% of public universities' libraries use social media tools, 5% of them do not use them, and while 90% of the libraries of private universities use these tools, 10% of them do not. In addition, it was found that the rate of the social media tools used by both groups of libraries are different: 33% use Foursquare, 26% use Facebook, 15% use Twitter, 5% use Google Plus, 4% use Blogs, YouTube, or Instagram, 3% use Pinterest or Flickr, 2% use Wordpress, and 1% use RSS.