Resource Review #2

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2317/2063
"Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope" by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu; First Monday, Volume 14, Number 1 - 5 January 2009

This resource is not directly related to libraries using Twitter. However, I still think it's very interesting and useful for this project. In this article from the online journal First Monday, the authors present the results of their study of over 300,000 Twitter users. The study found that the majority of Twitter users have far more followers and followees on the site than actual "friends" -- defined in the study as people who have communicated directly with each other via Twitter at least twice. Thus, the idea that a list of Twitter followers or followees can accurately represent a person's social network is untrue. A much more important and much smaller network underlies the "official" network, and is composed of the people who actually interact with each other via the service on a regular basis. As the article's Introduction puts it, "users faced with many daily tasks and large number of social links default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention."

Of course, these authors are primarily discussing social networking in terms of relationships between individuals, not between individuals and organizations. So why do I think this study is relevant to libraries using Twitter? The concept of a smaller network of truly important links underlying the larger social network still applies here. The number of Twitter followers a library has could be much less meaningful than the number of people who actually use Twitter to communicate or interact with the library. The library's actual "friends" may be a much smaller group than its Twitter followers.

I do not believe the results of this study would suggest that Twitter cannot be a useful tool for libraries, but rather that libraries cannot assume their list of followers tells the whole story. Paying attention to who really interacts with a library via Twitter could help the library staff identify some of the patrons who are truly invested in the library and who could be its strongest supporters. Thus it seems to me that it's very important for libraries who use Twitter not to simply use it as an announcement service and ignore it between postings of their own tweets, but to pay attention to their followers and be prompt in replying to any tweets directed at the library.