Library and Information Science Commons^™

Marketing Finding Aids On Social Media: What Worked And What Didn’T Work, Felicia Williamson, Scott Vieira, James Williamson

Fondren Library Research

Sam Houston State University’s Special Collections (SHSU) needed a way to expose finding aids to more users. Using social media to promote online awareness, while simultaneously improving search engine result rankings for the finding aids, seemed like a potential solution to this problem. With this goal in mind, SHSU researchers selected ten social media sites to test the assumption that posting information about finding aids to social media would be an effective marketing strategy. Following three months of posting information about finding aids while tracking user traffic to finding aids from social media sites, the research findings indicate that a …