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Earlier this month, ZSR’s Twitter account was born! Chris Burris has been updating regularly about events, resources, and announcements. We already have fourteen followers after just twelve days of tweeting!

I took a look at a post from 2009 that attempted to list all the libraries on Twitter, and found a few university libraries that were similar to ours with Twitter accounts. I did a mini-study of the accounts from Emory, Duke, Cornell, BYU, and Baylor to find out which features made them more or less “followed” by other Twitter users. Here is what I found:

• Emory has 80 followers as of its creation in June 2010. Most tweets are replies to other Twitter users and library-related article links.
• Duke has 486 followers as of its creation in January 2009. Most tweets are links to their Library Hacks blog, links to library-related articles, events and news, and new library resources at Duke.
• Cornell has 468 followers as of its creation over one year ago. Most tweets are links to library-related articles, re-tweets (RTs), events, and Cornell library-related.
• BYU has 96 followers as of its creation in February 2009. Most tweets are replies to other Twitter users and events.
• Baylor has 406 followers as of its creation over one year ago. Most tweets are related to new library resources and events.

There are a number of findings that could be useful to our Twitter account. The libraries with the most followers tend to tweet about library resources, events, news, and library science-related articles. The ones with fewer followers have replies to Twitter users in their feed and appear to tweet less frequently. Based on the tweets ZSR has thus far, we seem to be on par with successful library users of Twitter.

Of course, there are variables that make this mini-study less reliable. Consider how long each of these accounts have been active as well as the many ways (or lack of ways) their Twitter accounts may have been marketed to their users. In addition, library and university size and the demographics of library users would contribute to overall number of followers.

It will be interesting to see how our number of followers might change over time as we promote it as a service of ZSR. It could be used for reference inquiries via direct messaging or even, as they have implemented at Harvard, a way to tweet every book that gets checked out!

The Web Committee brainstormed ideas like a series of tweets following the “life” of a book or movie as it gets circulated, or perhaps tweets on which materials are returned. Chris is looking into use of our account through cell phones, and he plans to feature collections and new resources throughout the semester. There are lots of possibilities!