Abstract:

Social media, as part of the new Web 2.0 techniques, have changed the way we communicate. Through its innovative methods to connect with the public instantly, Twitter has become an important resource in communicative practice, becoming the most popular social network. According to the latest statistics (Internet Live Stats, 2020) users send 9.223 tweets per second which means nine times more publications than Instagram, for instance (1.031 photos uploaded per second). Twitter boosts social exchange, public opinion and be well keep informed (Hoeber, Hoeber, El Meseery, Odoh, & Gopi, 2016). Twitter, as a two-way communication platform in nature, enables people to communicate through small talk, without passing along meaningful information (Rogers, 2014).

During the last decade, university public libraries have increased their presence in Twitter (Sewell, 2013). Twitter's functional features have helped libraries to build an effective online presence that leads to the desired levels of twitter metrics. Considering these metrics, Spanish libraries have greatly approached this social network (Gonzalez Fernández-Villavicencia, Martín Marichal, Martín Rodero, & Menéndez, 2019).

Nonetheless, less attention has been paid to virtual communities. Communication should not be unilateral from the institution. Among the different objectives pursued by Spanish university libraries in their implementation in social media, we can find not only to reach visibility to the services provided by the libraries, but also to encourage dialogue with the user and facilitate interaction (Barrionuevo Almuzara et al., 2014). There must be interaction in a participatory communication model, based on dialogue and conversation. Virtual communities tend to obey to different purposes. According to Dutot and Mosconi (2016), virtual communities share interests, ideas or sentiments through internet. The members of the community exchange impressions around these contents and a feeling of belonging arises. The feeling of belonging to the community enables word-of-mouth by logical and emotional reasons (Le, 2018). Online engagement is the nexus of emotional and social union between the user and the organization. In this sense, it is defined as a deliberate effort by the company to motivate, empower and measure a customer's voluntary contribution to the company's marketing functions beyond the main economic transaction (Harmeling, Moffett, Arnold, & Carlson, 2017).

Considering this context, this paper aims to explore social media virtual communities in academic libraries of several Spanish public universities through twitter user-generated-content analysis. Very little research has deepened in the description of the virtual communities university libraries. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to explore public university twitter community characteristics in terms of audience and engagement (Socialwin, 2014). Next, to introduce and describe the sentiment classification and main topics expressed by twitters’ users in these virtual communities.

For achieving our objectives, an exploratory methodology is proposed using Nvivo, v.11 software. Our results provide interesting information about virtual communities behavior and their interests. Also insights for improving twitter communication between libraries and users are provided.

Keywords:

Libraries, Virtual communities, Engagement, Sentiment analysis, Data mining, Twitter.