Presented by EBSCO's Nordic Sales Manager Jakob Harnesk, the survey queried 1241 EBSCO customers based in Europe about how social media applications like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter fit in the library world. In keeping with EBSCO's customer demographics, about half of the respondents (51%) came from the University/College sector, with governments, research institutes, health organisations, and corporations, and other comprising about 10% each of the remaining participant segments. Sixty-two percent of respondents were between 35-55.
In terms of how the libraries' users are engaging with social media, 59% of participants said their constituents use it at least some of the time, and another 34% said 'most of them use it regularly'. Accordingly, the vast majority (85%) of libraries queried are using it or planning to, with only 15% saying that they are not interested in interactive platforms. Social networks, blogging, RSS, and Twitter were named as the most widely used technologies by the participants.
The majority of users queried say they spend 10-20% of their time maintaining that social presence. In fact, the time it takes to maintain an active social media presence - for a benchmark, 56% said they posted less than 5 times a week, and 36% post 5-10 times/week - was highlighted as one of the difficulties faced with regard to social media.
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