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OIR
44,1
258
Received 5 November 2018
Revised 21 June 2019
Accepted 26 November 2019
Online Information Review
Vol. 44 No. 1, 2020
pp. 258-277
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-11-2018-0345
Analysis of content topics, user
engagement and library factors
in public library social media
based on text mining
Soohyung Joo
School of Information Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
Kun Lu
School of Library and Information Studies,
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA, and
Taehun Lee
Department of Psychology, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, The Republic of Korea
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore topics of Facebook posts created by public libraries using
the bi-term topic model, and examine the relationships between types of topics and user engagement. The
authors further investigated the effects of three library factors, namely, staff size, budget and urbanization
degrees, on Facebook content and user engagement based on multilevel generalized linear modeling.
Design/methodology/approach – This study suggested a novel method, a combination of the bi-term topic
modeling and MGLM, to enhance the understanding of social media in the context of public libraries.
Findings – The findings revealed that posts related to community events, awards and photos were likely to
receive more likes and shares, whereas posts about summer reading programs received relatively more
comments. In addition, the authors found that a larger staff size and the inclusion of multimedia had positive
impacts on user engagement.
Originality/value – This study analyzed the content of public library-generated social media based on text
mining. Then, the authors examined the effects of contextual library-level factors on social media practice in
public libraries. Based on empirical findings, the study suggested a range of practical implications for
effective use of social media in public libraries.
Keywords Social media, Public libraries, User engagement, Bi-term topic modelling,
Multilevel generalized linear modelling
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Social media serves as a low-cost and useful tool that public libraries can utilize to expand
their reach to patrons online. Through social media, public libraries can efficiently
communicate with patrons, promote their services, easily disseminate information and
increase their online visibility (Neo and Calvert, 2012; Dankowski, 2013; Luo et al., 2013;
Shiri and Rathi, 2013; Smeaton and Davis, 2014; Fasola, 2015). Many libraries have
recognized the benefits of using social media and have adopted different social media
platforms for marketing of their services as well as engagement with their patrons online
(Rutherford, 2008; Crawford, 2014).
Researchers in the field of library and information science have also recognized the
importance of social media as an emerging tool for library marketing, and have investigated
different aspects of social media practice in library environments. In particular, the analysis of
social media content was one of the main interests for library science researchers. Previous
studies (e.g. Aharony, 2010, 2012; Chen et al., 2012; AlKindi and Al-Suqri, 2013) have explored the
types of social media content created by public libraries and qualitatively attempted to identify
different categories of this content. In addition, efforts were made to understand the adoption of
social media in libraries (e.g. Neo and Calvert, 2012; Fasola, 2015) and to suggest practical Public library
guidelines for effective social media practice in libraries (e.g. Steiner, 2012; Tomlin, 2014). social media
Prior studies in other areas proved that user engagement is critical in the success of
social media activities (Ha et al., 2016; Schreiner et al., 2019), and user engagement has been
used to assess effectiveness of social media marketing (Sachs et al., 2011). User engagement
has been considered a critical element in public relations via social media, but many
organizations have difficulty finding proper strategies to use social media for user 259
engagement (Gruss et al., in press). Yet, there has been relatively little research to investigate
the relationship between types of social media content and user engagement in public
libraries. Also, little is known in regard to how library-level factors are associated with
social media practice in public libraries. In an effort to fill these research gaps, this study
intends to use text mining to explore content topics of public libraries’ Facebook posts and
to examine the relationships between Facebook post topics and user engagement. The study
further investigates how library staff size, budget and location influence Facebook content
as well as user engagement. Methodologically, this study attempts to employ a combination
of text mining and multilevel generalized linear modeling (MGLM) in understanding the
relationships among Facebook posts’ content, user engagement, and certain factors of the
library at the same time. In addition, we discussed practical implications for effective use of
social media in public libraries based on the findings of this study.

Literature review
The use of social media in libraries
Social media has served as a useful and low-cost tool for libraries in advancing the capacity
of marketing to reach a larger audience, disseminating information about libraries and
engaging with communities (Cahill, 2011; Neo and Calvert, 2012; Smeaton and Davis, 2014).
Researchers acknowledged that the interactive nature of social media can be beneficial to
building close relationships and networks with user communities. Krabill (2009) claimed
that Twitter can be an effective tool for interacting with patrons, and that it should be used
in a way that facilitates user engagement rather than being used as a bulletin board for
announcements and news. To achieve this, libraries need to create content that is more
interactive. In their investigation of Web 2.0 technologies in the context of public libraries,
Anttiroiko and Reijo (2011) found that social media facilitates faster, easier and informal
communication between libraries and patrons. Social media also serves as an outlet for
content sharing and networking. They concluded that social media provides new
opportunities for public libraries to enhance their relationships with patrons on a virtual
platform. Smeaton and Davis (2014) attempted to identify cases on the effective use of social
media for marketing purposes in public libraries. They specifically identified the functions
of social media in library marketing, including such functions as creating communities,
connecting with users, encouraging participation and creating organizational culture.
Peacemaker et al. (2016) surveyed librarians to identify the gaps and challenges in social
media practices in libraries. Based on the findings, they suggested goal-based content
strategies for effective public relations via social media channels.
Another line of previous research investigated factors affecting social media adoption
and librarians’ perceptions of social media use in library marketing. For example, Neo and
Calvert (2012) found that social media adoption is related to an organization’s previous
practice, perceived needs, innovativeness and social norms. They also identified a range of
factors associated with social media use in libraries, such as relative advantage,
compatibility and complexity. Fasola (2015) surveyed librarians’ perceptions and
acceptance of social media use for library service marketing. The study revealed that
librarians had a positive attitude and a high level of acceptance toward the use of social
media in promoting library services. Smeaton and Davis (2014) explored critical factors that
OIR would lead to successful use of social media in public libraries in terms of organizational
44,1 environments and staff attitudes. Phillips (2015) also investigated librarians’ attitudes
toward social media and their roles, focusing on library services for youth patrons. Her
study found that librarians highly recognized the benefits of social media as a tool for
engagement with young patrons. In addition, she claimed that librarians can collaborate
with young patrons to jointly create diverse social media content.
260 Researchers have also analyzed the social media content generated by libraries and made
efforts to identify different categories of social media posts within library environments.
Aharony (2010) investigated the content of social media message in both public and
academic libraries and identified different categories of Twitter messages in the library
context. These categories included library events, book recommendations, library collection,
library services, references, information about lectures, classes, among several others.
Aharony (2012) also explored the use of Facebook in libraries and observed that public
libraries utilized the Facebook wall and photo section as major channels of communicating
with patrons. Additionally, Aharony categorized the types of Facebook posts uploaded by
public libraries into library activities, services, general situations, collections, among others.
Aharony mentioned that libraries tended to use Facebook mainly for dissemination of
information rather than as a channel for interactive dialog or discussion with their patrons.
In the investigation of social media use among Association of Research Libraries member
institutions, Wan (2011) found that many of academic libraries utilized their Facebook
account mainly for sharing library events and resource updates. Jacobson (2011) identified
different uses of Facebook in academic library environments, including announcements and
marketing, reference services, user forums, events, resources, and others. Chen et al. (2012)
analyzed a large set of social media posts collected from forty libraries and identified
different types of interactions, including knowledge sharing, information dissemination,
communication and knowledge gathering. They observed that dissemination of information
was the most prevalent type of content and that knowledge sharing messages were likely to
attract more responses from users. Based on content analysis, Shiri and Rathi (2013)
classified library-generated tweets into thirteen categories: acknowledgment, advisory
services, announcement, event, feedback seeking, information sharing, library operations,
news, among others. Among these, the messages on announcements, information sharing,
and recommendation/suggestions were viewed most frequently. AlKindi and Al-Suqri
(2013) qualitatively analyzed different types of Facebook marketing activities in libraries in
regard to information sources (e.g. information about books, book recommendations,
workshop, etc.) and information about the library (e.g. library news, events, services, etc.).
Similarly, Al-Daihani and AlAwadhi (2015) classified libraries’ tweets into seven categories
including news and announcements, library services, library collections, content type,
technology, suggestions/satisfactions and interaction. Cavanagh (2016) investigated the use
of Twitter in public libraries and classified the content of tweets into categories of arts and
culture, community, format and library-related information. Tan et al. (2012) analyzed 82
academic library Facebook pages in the Asia-Pacific region, and identified seven categories
of posts, such as promotion, announcements, news and others. These efforts made to
identify categories of social media content have greatly aided in understanding the types of
information generated by libraries. However, these previous analyses on social media
content were mostly done qualitatively, which limits the scale and generalizability of
the findings.
Researchers also explored different aspects of user engagement in social media in library
environments. Witte (2014) investigated social media posting methods, user responses, and
types of organizations followed in the analysis of 28 academic library Facebook pages. In her
research, she claimed that libraries can advertise their social media profiles by actively
interacting with online community members via liking, commenting on, or sharing the content
of others. Glazer (2012) discussed metrics for libraries’ Facebook pages involving users’ Public library
engagement, such as the number of fans for the library’s page and its trends, frequencies of social media
likes and user posted comments, and anecdotes illustrating the library page’s impact. Young
and Rossmann’s study (2015) investigated a community-building capability of Twitter use in
academic libraries. Their empirical analysis of two phases of twitter revealed that two-way
interactive content helped grow user communities in an academic library. Van Beynen and
Swenson (2016) monitored a student-run university social media group to assess students’ 261
engagement with academic libraries in social media spaces. They suggested that libraries
can benefit from those student-run social media channels to increase students’ participation in
in-library events. Chatten and Roughley (2016) conducted a case study about the University of
Liverpool Library’s social media use focusing on user engagement and community building.
Their case study revealed that well-maintained social media presence not only promotes
the library’s national profiles but also helps building good relationships with different
stakeholders. Gruss et al. (in press) examined success factors of social media posts that could
evoke higher levels of user engagement in academic libraries. They analyzed classes of
community-related activation terms and assessed their influence on user engagement while
focusing on community building. In this way, user engagement has been one of the main
elements in prior research, but most of these studies have been conducted in academic library
environments. Little research has investigated the relationships between social media content
and user engagement in the context of public libraries.

Topic models for social media content analysis

Topic model is a group of statistical or mathematical models that automatically extract
themes, that is, topics, from a large volume of natural language text. Latent semantic
analysis that relies on vector space modeling and singular-value decomposition was an
early attempt to extract higher-order structures from terms in documents (Deerwester et al.,
1990). Hofmann extended the latent semantic analysis methods to a probabilistic framework
and proposed probabilistic latent semantic analysis (Hofmann, 1999). Topic models began to
attract a lot of attention after the introduction of the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
model (Blei et al., 2003). Since then, varieties of topic models have been proposed to better
accommodate different data structures and features (e.g. Rosen-Zvi et al., 2004; Blei and
Lafferty, 2007; Teh et al., 2012).
One of the shortcomings of conventional topic models is their unsuitability to model
short texts. Conventional LDA topic models treat a document like a mixture of topics and a
topic like a mixture of terms. The parameters are then estimated through the observation of
documents and terms in the corpus. The document must be reasonably lengthy to
accurately estimate the parameters. For short texts, there is a severe data sparsity problem.
A bi-term topic model has been proposed to address the short text problem (Yan et al., 2013).
The bi-term model directly learns word co-occurrences in topics in the whole corpus without
relying on the topic mixtures in documents (Figure 1). This circumvents the problem of
short documents because the mixture of topics in documents is not directly estimated. The
bi-term topic models have been applied to the context of social media data and proven to be
effective in analyzing short text collected from social media (e.g. Li et al., 2016; Amplayo and
Song, 2017). As social media posts tend to be short, the bi-term topic model is an appropriate
solution for analyzing the content of social media.

Research questions
In this study, we intend to use text mining to identify topics of Facebook posts uploaded
by public libraries. We also analyze the relationships between Facebook content and user
engagement. Further, we examine the associations between library-level factors and
OIR
44,1 d 

Z Z

262
 W  Wi Wj
Figure 1. K N K
Comparison between B
the conventional LDA D
and the bi-term topic Conventional LDA Biterm Topic Model
model
Source: Yan et al. (2013, p. 1447)

Facebook content, and user engagement. The following three research questions guided
the study:
RQ1. What types of topics are derived from Facebook posts created by public libraries?
RQ2. What are the relationships between Facebook content and user engagement?
RQ3. What are the impacts of library-level factors such as staff size, library budget and
library location on Facebook content and user engagement?

Research model
Overall, the research model of this study examines multiple factors influencing user
engagement in public library social media. User engagement in social media refers to users’
interaction with content and it can be used to assess the success of social media activities
(Brettel et al., 2015; Ha et al., 2016; Schreiner et al., 2019). User engagement in social media
has been perceived as an important element in public relation strategies (Gruss et al., in
press). User engagement can lead to users’ positive perspectives on organizations and
facilitate a sense of community (Beukeboom et al., 2015). Organizations need to actively
interact with users to better use the platform for public relations, rather than just using the
tools for announcements (Peacemaker et al., 2016). Social media can be useful for libraries
not only in publicizing library resources and services but also building relationships with
users in library environments (American Library Association, 2012). In this sense, we
recognized the importance of user engagement in social media marketing.
In this research, we assume that Facebook post content would influence the levels of user
engagement. Prior literature indicates that users’ responses to social media could be influenced
by content of messages (e.g. Glazer, 2012; Han et al., 2019; Schreiner et al., 2019). For example,
Schreiner et al., 2019 found that content characteristics and emotion in social media could
have an impact on user engagement behavior. Similarly, Han et al.’s (2019) study empirically
revealed the associations between types of social media messages and user engagement levels.
This study attempts to this kind of effect, i.e. the influence of social media content on user
engagement, in the context of public libraries. In addition, contextual factors can influence
users’ interaction with social media ( Jaakonmäki et al., 2017). Library-level factors such as
budget, staff and resources can determine library services and library uses in public libraries
(Burke, 2018; Huang and Tahamtan, 2018; Joo and Cahill, 2019), and we paid attention to
potential effects of library factors on social media practices. That is, this study focuses on
library-level factors, including budget, staff and urbanization rate of location, on both social
media practices and corresponding user engagement.
 Our research model includes library-level factors, such as staff size, budget and Public library
urbanization rate. In order to accommodate the multilevel data structure, we adopted the social media
MGLM approach. In the statistical literature, it is well known that ignoring the nested data
structure produces inflated Type I error rates and may miss important relationships
involving organization-level predictors (Finch et al., 2016; Stroup, 2016). Therefore, this
study proposes a multilevel model that examines two levels of different factors affecting
user engagement: Post-level (Level 1) examined the relationships between the social media 263
posts’ topic types and the inclusion of multimedia, and user engagement, whereas the
library level (Level 2) examined the effects of library-related factors, i.e. staff size, budget
and urbanization rate, on the posts’ topic types and user engagement. Figure 2 shows a
graphical representation of the research model.
First, at the post-level (Level 1), we investigated the content of each post in terms of its
topic and multimedia inclusion. The bi-term topic model was used to determine the topic types
of Facebook posts. Libraries’ Facebook posts can cover various topics such as events
happening at the library, books and collections, services, library programming, information
about the library, among others (Aharony, 2012; Dryden, 2014). We adopted text mining,
specifically the bi-term topic model, to identify different types of topics of Facebook post text.
Then, we identified the topic types that users engage with the most: measured by the numbers
of likes, shares and comments from patrons. In addition, we examined whether the inclusion of
multimedia in a Facebook post influences user engagement. In the context of social media,
user engagement can be represented by the user’s behavior. That is, users can explicitly show
their interest in a social media post through options availed to them for interaction, such as
clicking the like button, sharing the post, or commenting on the post. User engagement, which
can be measured through sharing, comments, responses to calls-to-action and likes to the post,
is a critical component in social media practices (Peacemaker et al., 2016). On Facebook, three
types of indicators, namely likes, shares, and comments, reveal different levels of user
engagement: likes indicate the lowest level of engagement without verbal expression; shares
involve voluntary spreading of messages to other social media communities; and comments
represent the highest level of engagement because it takes time and effort to respond to a
particular message (Cho et al., 2014).
Second, we assumed that library-related factors could have an impact on social media
content and user engagement. At the library level (Level 2), we intended to analyze how
library staff size, budget and location were associated with Facebook posts’ content and
user engagement. We chose two variables that could represent library resources: staff size
and budget. Staff size and budget can be used as proxy variables representing library

Multilevel generalized linear modeling

Library-level

Staff size Budget Urbanization

rate

Post-level

User
Topics Inclusion of engagement
(k = 12) multimedia Figure 2.
Research model
Number of likes, comments, shares
OIR resources ( Joo and Cahill, 2016) and these variables can be attained from the IMLS (n.d.)
44,1 national library survey statistics. For libraries, social media can be another system that
incurs such costs as staff time and effort among others in order to create content and
communicate with users (Neo and Calvert, 2012). Although social media is considered a
low-budget marketing tool, it still uses up some resources in the library (Dankowski, 2013).
Therefore, we attempted to examine how the variable of library resources would be
264 associated with social media content and user engagement. We further explored the effect of
location: whether a library is located in an inner-city urban area or a rural area. Social media
might be a less effective tool if the library is in a rural or less technology focused community
(Krabill, 2009), and, consequently, the library’s location might have a different impact on the
use of social media. The study aimed at examining the effect of location on social media
content and user engagement.

Data collection and analysis

To empirically test the research model, we reused the data set collected in other study
( Joo et al., 2018). Joo et al. (2018) analyzed the data qualitative using open coding and content
analysis. This study takes the text mining and multivariate statistics. Table I presents all the
variables of the data set. The original database comprised 4,637 Facebook posts. We used
4,066 Facebook posts that include any textual message, that is, we removed those posts that
have only an image or video without any text massage. The data set includes Facebook
posts collected from 151 randomly selected public libraries over a period of four months:
July 1–October 31 in 2015. All libraries selected had their own Facebook page. The following
information was included in the data set: the date of the post; the text in the post; the number
of likes on the post; the number of comments on the post; the number of shares of the post; and
whether or not the post included an image or a video clip. In addition, we retrieved the national
level public library statistics from IMLS (www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/data-collection/
public-libraries-survey) to obtain data regarding library staff size and budget. Data on
urbanization degree was extracted from the US Census 2010 data. For the variables of staff
size and budget, we normalized the values using the population of the legal service area
(PLSA). PLSA indicates the population in the area where a particular library is supposed to
offer services (IMLS, n.d.). In the field of library and information science, PLSA has been
adopted to represent the size of a library. Then, the three user engagement indicators, namely,
the numbers of likes, shares and comments, were standardized using the number of Facebook
followers. As both the numbers of PLSA and Facebook followers demonstrated a typical
Zipf’s law pattern, we applied a logarithm for standardization. To adjust the scale range for
analysis across the three library factors, we divided every staff size value by 10 and every
budget value by 10,000.

Dimension Variable Description

Post’s content level Topic type Topics extracted from bi-term topic models (T1–T12)
Inclusion of multimedia The existence of an image or video clip in the post
Library level Staff sizea Total paid FTE employees
Budget a Total operating expenditures
Urbanization rate Degree of urbanization based on the library zip code
User engagement Number of likes b
The number of “likes” that each post received from users
Number of commentsb The number of comments that each post received from users
Table I. Number of sharesb The number of “shares” that each post received from users
Research variables Notes: aNormalized by logarithm and PLSA; bnormalized by logarithm and the number of page followers
The number of user engagement indicators can be influenced by the size of user community, Public library
that is, a larger library tends to get more user engagement as it would have a larger social media
Facebook user community. Therefore, we needed to control for the effect of library size. As a
proxy to represent the size of Facebook user community, we chose the number of followers.
When looking at the distribution of the followers, it exhibited a reverse J-shaped pattern
(also called, Zipf’s law pattern) as shown in the figure below. After applying a logarithm, we
achieved a transformed pattern that is closer to linear pattern for analysis. The same 265
method was applied for PLSA. There was a severe reverse J-shaped pattern, so we
standardized it to make it closer to a linear pattern. The same method was applied for PLSA.
The graphs in Figure 3 indicate how the logarithm has changed the distribution of the data.
As to library-level predictors, we standardized the variables of “staff size” and “budget.” As
a way of standardization, we calculated staff size and budget size per each person of legal
service area.
The text in the 4,066 Facebook posts underwent a series of preprocessing, including
removing URLs, numbers, special characters, stemming and stop words. The text corpus was
then modeled using the bi-term topic model (Yan et al., 2013). The implementation from the
original authors (Yan et al., 2013) was used for the topic modeling process (https://github.
com/xiaohuiyan/BTM). The bi-term topic model is a method that learns topics by modeling
word by word co-occurrence patterns. Results from the model were then used to further
address our research questions. The hyper-parameters of the topic model were set as α ¼ 50/K
(K is the number of topics) and β ¼ 0.01. This setting is based on the suggestions of Steyvers
and Griffiths (2007). Different numbers of topics were trained: K ¼ 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 25.
The results from K ¼ 12 were reported because they showed the most coherent themes.
Facebook posts within libraries are hierarchically nested and are thus prone to be
correlated to each other within the same library. One of the assumptions in conventional
linear regression or ANOVA is that observations should be independent of each other. This
assumption invalidates the use of conventional statistical analysis in empirically testing the
research model of this study owing to the inherent interdependency between posts, that is, it
is necessary to control the dependency between observations in the analysis, that is,
Facebook posts nested within libraries, in order to accurately calculate model estimation.
Therefore, we adopted MGLM, which is a compelling solution to analyze the nest structure
data (Gelman and Hill, 2007). We established two specific analysis models based on the
MGLM to test the two levels of relationships. Standardizing was applied to the predictors on

Follower Follower (Transformed)

45,000 5

40,000 4.5

35,000
4
30,000
3.5
25,000
3
20,000
2.5
15,000

10,000 2

5,000 1.5

0 1
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160

PLSA PLSA (Transformed)

4,500,000
7
4,000,000 6.5

3,500,000 6

3,000,000 5.5

5
2,500,000

2,000,000
4.5

4
Figure 3.
1,500,000
3.5 Normalization of the
1,000,000 3 numbers of followers
500,000 2.5

2
and PLSA
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
OIR the library level to improve the interpretation of the analysis results. For fitting MGLMs, the
44,1 glmer function was used with lme4 package in R software (https://cran.r-project.org/web/
packages/lme4/index.html) (Bates et al., 2014).
The first model is designed to test the effects of library-level factors, that is, staff size,
budget size and urbanization rate, on topic types:
• Level 1:
266

Prob T ij ¼ c
Zcij ¼ log
¼ b0j :
Prob T ij ¼ C
• Level 2:
b0j ¼ g00 þg01 xj þg02 yj þg03 zj :

As the topics extracted from the text corpus consist of multiple categories, a logic link
function was employed. Here, i indicates each post, j indicates each library and Tij
represents the topic type of the ith post in Library j. Then, c refers to the topic type of
interest, C is the reference category and β0j indicates the random intercept accounting for the
variations among libraries for c. The selection of a reference category does not influence the
results of the analysis at all (Azen and Walker, 2010). At Level 2, xj, yj and zj indicate staff
size, budget and urbanization rate, respectively.
The second model is designed to test the effects of topic types and multimedia inclusion
on user engagement. We also examined the effects of library-level predictors on user
engagement. In this case, Yij indicates user engagement, measured by likes, shares and
comments, separately. Mij indicates the inclusion of any multimedia item in the post:
• Level 1:


log Y ij ¼ b0j þb1j T ij þb2j M ij :
• Level 2:

b0j ¼ g00 þg01 xj þg02 yj þg03 zj þu0j :

b1j ¼ g10 :

b2j ¼ g20 :

Results
Term frequency analysis
First, we tallied the frequency of observed terms. In total, 8,358 unique terms and 67,294
tokens were observed after removing stop words. As shown in Figure 3, the pattern of
frequency by rank exhibited a typical Zipf’s law, which asserts that a small number of top
unique words make up a larger portion of the entire text corpus. The top 100 most frequent
terms made up 35.12 percent of the total tokens. There were 3,992 terms that occurred only
once in the text corpus, which accounts for the long tail (Figure 4).
Table II shows the top 100 most frequently observed terms. The top three terms making
up more than 1 percent of the corpus were “librari,” “book” and “read,” respectively. Then,
among the top ten, we observed some terms related to library programs or events, such as
 Frequency × Rank Public library
2,500
social media
2,000

1,500
267
1,000

Figure 4.
500
The distribution of
term frequency
0 by rank
0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500 3,000 3,500 4,000 4,500 5,000

Rank Term Frequency Percent Rank Term Frequency Percent

1 librari 2,180 3.24 26 ag 237 0.35

2 book 1,044 1.55 27 event 233 0.35
3 read 827 1.23 28 teen 232 0.35
4 new 552 0.82 29 thursdai 230 0.34
5 come 488 0.73 30 kid 221 0.33
6 todai 474 0.70 31 stop 218 0.32
7 program 451 0.67 31 tuesdai 218 0.32
8 time 444 0.66 33 wednesdai 217 0.32
9 join 438 0.65 34 start 214 0.32
10 public 435 0.65 35 learn 212 0.32
11 summer 419 0.62 36 tomorrow 205 0.31
12 stori 380 0.57 37 fridai 203 0.30
13 juli 336 0.50 38 mondai 202 0.30
14 children 331 0.49 39 meet 196 0.29
15 free 330 0.49 40 movi 195 0.29
16 octob 312 0.46 41 open 194 0.29
17 septemb 311 0.46 42 month 191 0.28
18 fun 306 0.46 43 visit 190 0.28
19 saturdai 273 0.41 44 branch 189 0.28
20 august 265 0.39 45 call 188 0.28
20 check 265 0.39 46 famili 187 0.28
22 club 252 0.37 46 friend 187 0.28
23 make 251 0.37 46 sign 187 0.28 Table II.
24 thank 245 0.36 49 card 183 0.27 Top ranked
25 great 239 0.36 49 dont 183 0.27 stemmed terms

“come (5th),” “program (7th)” and “join (9th).” Additionally, time-, day- or month-related
terms were often observed in the top ranked terms, including “todai (6th),” “time (8th),” “juli
(13th),” “octob (16th),” “saturdai (19th)” and “tomorrow (36th),”among others. These indicate
that many of the posts show specific date or time for events or programs in public libraries.
We also observed several terms related to children and young adults, such as “children
(14th),” “teen (28th),” “kid (30th),” “school (51st)” and “storytim (91st).”

Topic analysis
As shown in Table III, the bi-term topic model generated 12 topics. In Table III, we listed ten
terms having highest topic probabilities. The numbers following the observed terms
OIR Topic (%) Topic description Top words (with topic probability)
44,1
T1 7.49 Library clubs book: 0.065812, librari: 0.022133, club: 0.021875, discuss:
0.018454, read: 0.015489, meet: 0.011154, new: 0.010240, join:
0.009479, lego: 0.008530, author: 0.008354
T2 8.11 Books (new books, book librari: 0.054910, new: 0.048357, book: 0.023144, card: 0.020155,
cards, eBooks) public: 0.012942, check: 0.011816, ebook: 0.008989, children:
268 0.008372, free: 0.007982, month: 0.007755
T3 5.09 Library events (music, music: 0.011968, perform: 0.010795, librari: 0.010519, book:
jazz, film) 0.006536, new: 0.006536, stori: 0.006329, free: 0.006294, jazz:
0.006174, film: 0.006105, present: 0.006087
T4 8.02 Library programming librari: 0.026232, free: 0.009240, program: 0.008989, octob:
0.007894, join: 0.007456, art: 0.007270, present: 0.006974, learn:
0.006164, famili: 0.005956, main: 0.005814, artist: 0.005595
T5 11.08 Summer reading read: 0.058738, summer: 0.035535, program: 0.027882, librari:
program 0.019516, book: 0.016518, prize: 0.010785, children: 0.009381,
hero: 0.009064, thank: 0.008803, school: 0.008295
T6 5.25 Community events librari: 0.017281, park: 0.014173, join: 0.006769, festiv: 0.006451,
(park, festival, city, todai: 0.005783, author: 0.005532, citi: 0.005365, dog: 0.004947,
concert) concert: 0.004914, american: 0.004797, come: 0.004730
T7 3.68 Photos/awards librari: 0.010285, photo: 0.008880, book: 0.008690, award:
0.008428, tbt: 0.006785, la: 0.005928, collect: 0.005785, texa:
0.005595, de: 0.005595, state: 0.005309, here: 0.005047
T8 4.62 Library events (national librari: 0.019420, nation: 0.012769, thank: 0.012142, read:
day, summer event) 0.012123, friend: 0.009767, job: 0.007316, counti: 0.007031,
summer: 0.007012, event: 0.006480, great: 0.006271,
come: 0.006252
T9 9.37 Storytimes stori: 0.033330, librari: 0.026141, time: 0.025120, read: 0.017303,
join: 0.015100, ag: 0.013947, come: 0.013488, todai: 0.012157,
wednesdai: 0.012082, plai: 0.011604
T10 1.27 Announcement (book librari: 0.073527, book: 0.027131, public: 0.021818, sale: 0.017230,
sale, open hours) saturdai: 0.010495, septemb: 0.010136, juli: 0.009771, close:
0.009156, open: 0.008598, octob: 0.008411
T11 1.54 Library events for teens librari: 0.026449, come: 0.012795, fun: 0.012596, join: 0.011544,
or kids make: 0.011442, teen: 0.010788, movi: 0.009645, juli: 0.008917,
craft: 0.008689, program: 0.007802, kid: 0.007654
Table III. T12 9.05 General information librari: 0.020106, learn: 0.011305, help: 0.010665, free: 0.009772,
The result of the (help, registration, pleas: 0.008675, registr: 0.008549, requir: 0.008501, call: 0.008442,
bi-term topic model contact information) class: 0.008112, inform: 0.007540, public: 0.007181

indicate the topic probabilities. The order of the topic is random. The result indicates that
programming- or event-related topics are prevalent in public libraries’ Facebook accounts.
T4, T5 and T9 are closely related to library programs, and these three topics make up about
28.5 percent of the posts. In particular, T5 and T9 are programs that are more specifically
related to children. We observed that T3, T6, T8 and T11 are relevant to events in libraries
or local communities, which made up about 16.5 percent of the posts. Then, T12
(9.05 percent) and T10 (1.27 percent) cover some general information about the library such
as help, registration, contacts, book sale or opening/closing hours. T2 (8.11 percent) and T1
(7.49 percent) are concerned with books and library clubs. Out of 12 topics, 8 exhibit “librari”
as the highest probability term.

User engagement by topic

Next, we investigated the relationships between topic types and user engagement. To begin
with, we analyzed the effects of topic types, multimedia inclusion and library-level factors
on the number of likes as shown in Table IV. The MGLM analysis indicates that topic types Public library
have significant impact on the level of user engagement. All 11 topics referenced in T1 had a social media
significant effect on the number of likes. In particular, the level of impact of T7 and T6 was
relatively greater among the topics while that of T4 and T12 was smaller. In addition, the
effect of multimedia inclusion was great as it showed a regression weight of 0.956 at the α
level of 0.001. Also, we observed that staff size significantly affected the number of likes
positively (β ¼ 0.847, p o0.001), whereas budget had a negative impact (β ¼ −0.482, 269
p o0.05). However, the urbanization rate had no significant influence.
Regarding the number of shares, we observed that some topic types were significant in
affecting the number of shares while others were not. In this case, the effects of T11, T6 and
T9 were relatively higher compared to other topics. However, the effects of T3, T4 and T8
were insignificant. We found that the effects of multimedia inclusion (β ¼ 1.024, p o0.001)
and staff size (β ¼ 1.082, p o0.01) were also significant in this case, but no significant
impacts of budget and urbanization rate were observed (Table V ).
Next, we examined the effects of topic types, multimedia inclusion and library factors on
the number of comments. As shown in Table VI, the effects of five topics, including T5, T8,
T9, T10 and T11, turned out to be significant at the α level of 0.05. In particular, the effects
of T5 (β ¼ 0.822, p o0.001), T8 (β ¼ 0.768, po 0.001) and T11 (β ¼ 0.613, p o0.001) were
relatively higher than other topics. In this case, the inclusion of multimedia also had a
significant impact on the amount of comments. Also, we observed a positive significant
impact of staff size on the number of comments (β ¼ 0.985, p o0.001).

The effects of factors at the library level on Facebook content

Finally, we examined how factors on the library level would be associated with the topic
types on Facebook. Table VII shows the results of MGLM analysis. Owing to the limited
space, only the topics that have at least one significant predictor at the α level of 0.05 were
included in the table. When T1 was set as the reference, we observed that the occurrences of
four topics were influenced by factors on the library level. In particular, the occurrences of
T5, T8, T9 and T10 were significantly associated with the location of the library at the α
level of 0.01. The results also reveal that T9 is observed less frequently when the library has
a smaller staff size.

Discussion
This study applied the bi-term topic model in researching the topics of Facebook posts in
public libraries. We then examined the association between topics and user engagement as
well as the effects of library-level factors using MGLM. Regarding the research model, this
study expands the scope of social media use research in the library science field by
attempting to analyze social media content, user engagement and library-level factors
simultaneously. The present study contributed to the evidence-based strategies for effective
use of social media in public libraries. In addition, this study employed a novel
methodological approach that incorporates text mining and MGLM for social media mining.
Frequency analysis identified most frequent terms observed from the Facebook posts
created by public libraries. Not surprisingly, “librari,” “book” and “read” were found to be
the three most frequently used terms in Facebook posts by libraries. The results revealed
that public libraries used Facebook to share information about library books, events and
programs. Library programs or event-related terms such as “come,” “program,” “join,”
“free,” “movi” and “event” were prevalent among the top 100 ranked terms. Also, we
observed that a lot of time-, date-, month- or season-related terms such as “todai,” “summer,”
“juli,” “octob,” “saturdai,” “tomorrow,” among others, ranked highly. Interestingly, the
four month names, “juli,” “octob,” “septemb” and “august,” which were the month names
of the data collection period, were ranked among the top 20 most frequently used terms.
OIR Predictor Estimate SE z-value Pr(W |z|)
44,1
Fixed effects
(Intercept) −0.766 0.094 −8.105 ***
T2 (books) 0.518 0.051 10.065 ***
T3 (library events – arts) 0.268 0.063 4.248 ***
T4 (programming) 0.139 0.061 2.263 *
270 T5 (summer reading) 0.691 0.051 13.504 ***
T6 (community events) 0.755 0.052 14.310 ***
T7 (photos, awards) 0.839 0.062 13.425 ***
T8 (library events – others) 0.565 0.065 8.681 ***
T9 (storytimes) 0.560 0.058 9.637 ***
T10 (announcement) 0.444 0.051 8.554 ***
T11 (events for teens/kids) 0.669 0.049 13.617 ***
T12 (general information) 0.199 0.063 3.157 **
Inclusion of multimedia 0.956 0.064 14.945 ***
Staff size 0.847 0.243 3.478 ***
Budget −0.482 0.238 −2.026 *
Urbanization rate 0.053 0.059 0.888 ns
Table IV.
The effects of topic Random effects
types, multimedia Variance SD
inclusion and library 0.52 0.7211
factors on the number Notes: ns, non-significant. Dependent variable: the normalized number of likes. Reference: T1. *p o0.05;
of likes **p o 0.01; ***p o 0.001

Predictor Estimate SE z-value Pr(W |z|)

Fixed effects
(Intercept) −3.705 0.245 −15.093 ***
T2 (books) 0.831 0.139 5.954 ***
T3 (library events – arts) 0.194 0.171 1.137 ns
T4 (programming) 0.295 0.167 1.760 ns
T5 (summer reading) 0.500 0.156 3.202 **
T6 (community events) 1.317 0.136 9.676 ***
T7 (photos, awards) 1.112 0.170 6.509 ***
T8 (library events – others) 0.217 0.209 1.035 ns
T9 (storytimes) 1.300 0.157 8.255 ***
T10 (announcement) 0.806 0.142 5.643 ***
T11 (events for teens/kids) 1.321 0.134 9.824 ***
T12 (general information) 1.035 0.155 6.667 ***
Inclusion of multimedia 1.024 0.194 5.257 ***
Staff size 1.082 0.416 2.600 **
Budget −0.564 0.404 −1.398 ns
Urbanization rate 0.052 0.114 0.457 ns
Table V.
The effects of topic Random effects
types, multimedia Variance SD
inclusion and library 1.423 1.193
factors on the number Notes: ns, non-significant. Dependent variable: the normalized number of shares. Reference: T1. **p o0.01;
of shares ***p o0.001

The names of the days of the weeks, that is, “mondai” to “saturdai,” excluding “sundai” were
ranked among the top 40 most frequently used terms, which shows that there were not
many events or programs scheduled for Sunday. This implies that many public library
social media messages contain time related information. Particularly, events, programs or
Predictor Estimate SE z-value Pr( W|z|)
Public library
social media
Fixed effects
(Intercept) −3.179 0.259 −12.242 ***
T2 (books) 0.241 0.209 1.154 ns
T3 (library events – arts) 0.183 0.255 0.719 ns
T4 (programming) 0.415 0.223 1.856 ns
T5 (summer reading) 0.822 0.188 4.364 *** 271
T6 (community events) 0.095 0.243 0.393 ns
T7 (photos, awards) 0.395 0.261 1.511 ns
T8 (library events – others) 0.768 0.235 3.265 ***
T9 (storytimes) 0.459 0.219 2.097 *
T10 (announcement) 0.399 0.196 2.035 *
T11 (events for teens/kids) 0.613 0.187 3.272 ***
T12 (general information) 0.208 0.236 0.883 ns
Inclusion of multimedia 0.825 0.203 4.064 ***
Staff size 0.985 0.284 3.467 ***
Budget −0.681 0.278 −2.450 *
Urbanization rate −0.027 0.081 −0.344 ns
Table VI.
Random effects The effects of topic
Variance SD types, multimedia
0.5616 0.7494 inclusion and library
Notes: ns, non-significant. Dependent variable: the normalized number of comments. Reference: T1. factors on the number
*p o0.05; ***p o0.001 of comments

Topic Predictor Estimate SE z-value Pr( W|z|)

Fixed effect
T5 (summer reading) (Intercept) 0.727 0.142 5.117 ***
Urbanization rate −0.340 0.147 −2.303 *
Staff size −0.131 0.605 −0.218 ns
Budget 0.306 0.647 0.474 ns
T8 (library events – others) (Intercept) −1.008 0.203 −4.966 ns
Urbanization rate −0.459 0.208 −2.197 *
Staff size 0.908 0.886 1.025 ns
Budget −0.778 1.008 −0.772 ns
T9 (storytimes) (Intercept) 0.179 0.168 1.067 **
Urbanization rate −0.307 0.179 −1.712 ns
Staff size −2.329 0.996 −2.337 *
Budget 2.073 1.023 2.026 *
T10 (announcement) (Intercept) 0.773 0.139 5.561 ***
Urbanization rate −0.613 0.145 −4.230 ***
Staff size −0.078 0.605 −0.130 ns
Budget 0.170 0.650 0.262 ns
Random effects
Topic Variance SD
T5 1.391 1.180
T8 2.111 1.453
Table VII.
T9 2.004 1.416 The effects of factors
T10 1.286 1.134 on the library level on
Notes: ns, non-significant. Reference: T1. *p o0.05; **p o0.01; ***p o0.001 topic types
OIR club meeting announcements are likely to include specific schedules, consisting of month,
44,1 day and time. This finding reaffirms several previous studies that reported library events
and programs as the most common content in libraries’ social media posts (e.g. Aharony,
2012; Chen et al., 2012; Shiri and Rathi, 2013; Cavanagh, 2016). Terms related to children’s
services, programs or storytimes, including such words as “stori,” “children,” “kid” and
“storytim,” were also frequently observed. Public libraries spend a significant portion of
272 their resources on serving and creating programs for children ( Joo and Cahill, 2016), and
then use social media to promote these services and programs.
The bi-term topic model uncovered prevalent topics from the Facebook posts corpus.
Different topics were identified ranging from library clubs, books, library events, programs,
community events, storytimes, and among others. Again, this result confirms that event or
program related content is prevalent in public libraries’ social media accounts (e.g. Aharony,
2012; Chen et al., 2012; Shiri and Rathi, 2013). There were multiple topics concerning library
events, and these topics reveal the nature of various events such as book events, jazz, films,
movies and summer affairs offered by libraries. In addition, we infer that one topic was
closely related to community events, which raised the probability of such terms as “park,”
“citi,” “festival” and “concert.” This kind of event-related posts is what users expect to see
from library social media (Sachs et al., 2011), and we found that public libraries upload
event-related information appropriately via Facebook. Public libraries can use social media to
promote and share events occurring in their local community beyond the confines of the
libraries (Madge and Coserea, 2014), that is, it can be a good strategy to talk about a variety of
things other than the library itself to increase the audience’s engagement (Glazer, 2012). Since
the data collection was conducted from summer to fall, there was a specific topic on summer
reading programs for children. Also, a separate topic related to library storytimes was derived
from the text corpus, and it exhibited high occurrences on such terms as “stori,” “time,” “read,”
“join” and “ag.” Results from the frequency analysis and bi-term topic model revealed that
various topics on Facebook content were created by public libraries, and posts about events
and programs particularly made up the larger portion of the content created by libraries.
The MGLM result revealed that some topics were likely to encourage more user
engagement than others. Users might differently interact with social media posts by type of
message (VanScoy et al., 2018). Regarding the number of likes, we found that posts related to
photos/award or community events tended to receive comparatively more likes from users. On
Facebook, posts with photos are likely to draw more attention from users (Malhotra et al.,
2013), and Facebook has a function that can create a photo album of a bundle of images on a
certain event or topic. Photo albums can provide information on what is going on in the
library, and users might want to react to the events or activities occurring in the library by
clicking on the like button. In addition, community event posts were likely to get more likes
compared to other topics. The content of library social media does not have to only be about
the library, and can include a variety of things going on in the community (Krabill, 2009). This
implies that an effective strategy for libraries would be to expand their scope of social media
content to include local community events in addition to the library ones. Regarding the
number of shares, the most shared topics were community events and fun events for teens or
kids. Posts related to community events were also liked frequently. This shows that users
showed the greatest interest in posts concerning community events, and also wanted to share
this information with their community members virtually. This finding affirms that libraries
can benefit from posting community events or news to grab the attention of users online and
encourage them to participate in these social media activities.
Announcements on children’s or teens’ programs were often posted on public libraries’
social media platforms. We can infer that users, particularly parents and caregivers, were
likely to spread information on library programs for children or young adults among their
online communities. This finding reveals that social media can be an effective channel for
promoting library programs or events for children and young adults. Regarding the number Public library
of comments, posts related to summer reading engaged users relatively more than other social media
topics. In particular, we found that many summer reading programs involve award
ceremonies or prize-winning events, which prompted participation as users congratulated
the winners via comments. Here is a typical example: “Congratulations to all our grand prize
drawing winners for our 2015 Summer Reading Celebration! Thank you to our generous
sponsors who donated prizes! … ….” In this way, posts about summer reading programs 273
would get relatively more comments from users, which is one of the main programs offered
by libraries during the summer time. Therefore, it is important for libraries to share those
summer program photos, particularly prize or award-winning events, to encourage user
engagement and draw their attention to services for children or young adults. The results
also confirm that posts with any multimedia item, such as images or video clips, encourage
more engagement, among users. Multimedia-embedded content is one of the ways to make
social media more user friendly (Tomlin, 2014), and it could be part of the motivation for
user engagement. Thus, libraries can benefit from the use of multimedia when creating
social media posts to increase the amount of user engagement.
We examined the effects of library factors on Facebook content and user engagement.
The MGLM results showed that library factors had no significant influence on most topics.
This implies that public libraries tended to produce similar patterns of content topics
regardless of their staff size, budget or location, that is, social media content would be less
likely to be influenced by factors on the library level. For only four topics, we observed some
significant effects at the α level of 0.05. For example, the findings revealed that public
libraries located in a more rural area were likely to upload more summer program related
posts. Regarding the effects of the library factors on user engagement, we found that staff
size has a significant effect on all three types of engagement, including likes, shares and
comments. Social media is a low-cost platform as it is basically free to set up an account, but
it still requires staff time and effort to produce content and interact with patrons online
( Jones and Harvey, 2019). More staff involvement could make social media channels to be
more interactive. Interactive social media pages will attract more users’ engagement and
participation (Ayu and Abrizah, 2011). This implies that staff’s time and effort might be
more important than other library resources in managing Facebook with regard to user
engagement. In addition, public libraries need to encourage staff time and effort to be
invested in strategizing how to make social media posts more interactive, which could
eventually result in user engagement (Young and Rossmann, 2015)
This study also has implications for research methods in social media use analysis. To
the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to employ the bi-term topic model to
explore the content of Facebook posts in public libraries. Joo et al. (2018) analyzed this set of
data, but they relied on subjective human judgment to classify the content of social
media posts. Methodologically, this study employed a quantitative approach based on
unsupervised machine learning. Facebook posts comprise relatively short text, so the
bi-term topic model is suited to analyze short text compared to the conventional LDA
approach. In addition, we attempted to look into the causal relationships between topic
types and user engagement. As Facebook posts are hierarchically nested in every library, a
regular regression or ANOVA is not appropriate to estimate parameters that vary at
multiple levels, that is, post-level and library level. Therefore, we employed an MGLM to
deal with the nested structure of variables. Another benefit of using the MGLM lies in that it
enables us to examine the effects of library-level factors, including staff size, budget and
location (Level 2), on post-level variables, including post-topic types, inclusion of multimedia
and user engagement (Level 1). The methodological framework suggested herein will be
useful in understanding social media practice, user engagement and organizational factors
comprehensively in different contexts.
OIR Conclusion
44,1 This study explored topical content of public libraries’ Facebook posts through text mining.
We found that social media posts by public libraries exhibited different topics of content,
such as library events, community events, books, summer reading programs, among others.
We also observed that posts related to community events or awards/photos received
comparatively more likes and shares whereas summer reading programs received relatively
274 more comments. Also, staff size and the inclusion of multimedia positively impacts user
engagement. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt in applying a
combination of the bi-term topic modeling and the MGLM to enhance the understanding of
social media use in public libraries. In addition, we suggested practical implications that can
be useful for library practitioners to effectively use social media in public libraries.
This study identifies some limitations. First, the four months’ worth of data from 151 libraries
might be insufficient in representing social media practice across the USA. We found that social
media posts are influenced by season or month, so topics or patterns of use might differ in
different seasons. Second, this study did not investigate other popular social media platforms
such as Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Public libraries have adopted multiple platforms in
their social media marketing (Crawford, 2014), and this study only presents the case of Facebook.
These limitations illustrate the need for future research that extends the data collection to cover a
full year and that uses a larger sample. Also, further studies will look into other social media
contexts, particularly the use of Twitter in public libraries.

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Further reading
Rogers, C.R. (2011), “Social media, libraries, and Web 2.0: how American libraries are using new tools
for public relations to attract new users – fourth annual survey”, South Carolina State
Documents Depository, available at: https://dc.statelibrary.sc.gov/bitstream/handle/10827/7271/
SCSL_Social_Media_Libraries_2011.pdf (accessed October 5, 2018).

Corresponding author
Taehun Lee can be contacted at: lee.taehun@gmail.com

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