 Hi. Hello and welcome everyone to our poster presentation of hashtag thesis Tuesday at the University of Pacific. Sharing this information with you today is Michelle Gibney University of the Pacific Library. My name is Stacy Wallace and I will be your host for the next 10 minutes. Just a quick reminder before we begin, during the presentation, please keep your audio and video muted. Please feel free to use the Q&A tab to pose any questions, which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. And you can navigate to any other sessions by clicking the desired session in the hop-in schedule or click the left-hand sidebar. Thank you for joining us and I'll turn it over to Michelle. Awesome. Thank you, Stacy. So I am sharing my screen so it's working. So I'm going to go ahead and start. So at the end of 2020, the social media manager for Pacific Library gave her resignation. And as her manager, I was expected to take over starting in 2021 until we could hire someone else, but there was a hiring freeze and we still haven't hired anyone, so it's still me. And as it couldn't be my primary focus every day when my main job is the institutional repository and scholarly communications, I tried as much as possible to create long-running campaigns that could last over multiple months or the whole year. And I especially targeted ones that I could set up in advance and schedule on Hootsuite, the social media scheduling manager that I convinced the library to buy for me. So at the time, a Thesis Tuesday campaign sounded like an ideal fit. It would allow me to create something for every week for the whole year. I had all the content ready in the form of 52 plus ETDs that had been posted in the institutional repository so far in 2020. It focused on students, which is always a plus, but it also provided content with it, which is my actual job. So I created that spreadsheet of all the 2020 I had and I set a student worker to help me find images corresponding to the titles and abstracts. I gave her specific websites to search where images were CC licensed like Pexels and Pixabay. And while she worked on that, I figured out what text I wanted to use. I created the short links using Bitly to the ETDs and the IR. I chose hashtags and I identified the account tag for the school for each post in Instagram. Once I had all the images sourced on my spreadsheet, I decided on a standardized template. You can see there are three examples on this poster of the actual posts. I changed the color background for each, but it was a basic insert image and copy paste the title and author info into Canva, which is the graphics creation tool I was using. Once I had all the graphics created, it was a simple matter of uploading them individually to Hootsuite and copy pasting in the info from the spreadsheet. I scheduled them for each Tuesday and I was done, which was awesome. So sourcing the images took the student assistant about a week, part-time, of course. Me creating all the graphics text and scheduling them out took about a day. Overall, it was a pretty simple project and I was really hopeful it would go over well with our social media followers. And even if it didn't, it was one post a week done for the entire year, which was really a relief for me when I was trying to come up with all this content for the whole year. So January 5th, the first post went live. It was, uh-oh. Feedback, no, okay. So the first post went live January 5th. It was chosen a bit sneakily as it was by one of the vice presidents Pacific who was getting his education doctorate. So I was like, he works here and he's a student, so it's a good one to do. So it's the one with the green background on the slide. It did get two reshares on Instagram, one from the school of education and one from the graduate school. It got 26 likes on Instagram, which is kind of average to below average for us. Pitchers that get a lot of likes like over a hundred are usually of the library, like the building itself or some other pretty scenery on campus. That's what people like the most. Most everything else is under 50 likes. So this seemed not great, but not the worst either. And the ETD in the IR got 21 downloads the month in which that post went live. And total as of this week, it's had 336 downloads. So that's pretty good. And then the second post went out the next week, which is the one with the dark red background and it got a really great response. It got two comments, seven reshares, seven saves, 52 likes on Instagram and then 60 downloads the month it was posted from the ETD in the IR. It's had 522 downloads total as of this week. The two comments, one is a relative of the author who tagged the actual author in it and said, I'm going to quote this, You are amazing. Grandma said you make her heart soar and I couldn't agree more. You are brilliant, which is basically just the cutest. So I do think that the amount of attention this one and the first one got on Instagram correlates to the downloads the ETDs got from the IR during the month they were posting because they were relatively similar. But the third one pictured here with the yellow background is one of the lowest likes. It only got 10 likes on Instagram and it had only two downloads the month it was posted on Instagram. It has the absolute highest number of total downloads out of all the posts so far at 1247. So that definitely doesn't correlate and has more to do with the search engine optimization of the IR and interest in that particular work over time over the year it's been up. So some other things to note as I've included in my conclusion section on the slide overall I think that it was a fine campaign. It didn't get the engagement I hope for after the first two posts, the rest of it was kind of a middling average of 17 likes per post on Instagram. But again, the return on investment for me and having taken the day to do this, and then having 52 posts for the whole year kind of outweighed that. And I think there are definitely ways to improve it. So if you're thinking of doing this here are some ideas. And some things that might help would be to customize the hashtags a little bit more individualize them for each ETD, even though that would of course require more work but it could be done by a student. Make them images and not videos I made them all videos and it had a little animation for the title and author name at the bottom, which didn't look as great on Instagram's feed and didn't work well to share as stories on Instagram. It could also be really helpful to share them on stories on Instagram. Most of our Instagram followers are students and students generally seem to watch the stories on Instagram and not scroll through their feeds so having them be in stories is beneficial. I haven't included the data about it here but we did cross post all of these on Twitter as well but our Twitter following is much lower than Instagram. And they had an average of like three likes per post on Twitter so I didn't bother to include the data here. And results I would do this again I would make a couple of changes as I've outlined and see if they make a difference if engagement continued to be low I'd probably scrap the process, but you never know when you'll get a fun comment that talks about grandma and I live for that cuteness. So, that is kind of the end of my poster talk so I'd love to take questions are here about other ways and if you have used social media to spread awareness of your student research on on campus too. And we do have a question already from Terry green in the chat. She just wondered how were the ETD selected. How were images selected. Were you worried that the images may change the perception of the ETDs. That is a great question so the ETDs were selected. We it's not a high research institution so we usually have like 70 something ETDs a year. And since I had to pick 52 of them. I picked the ones that did have the more interesting topics are the more interesting titles like there were a lot of them that were by our pharmacy graduate students and some life sciences, which had very very technical and scientific science titles, and it was harder to find images for those and it was harder to make them more exciting. So a lot of none of these images have them but a lot of the other images have like scientists on them are like a picture of a microscope or something like that. So I tried to pick ones that I could use photos where there were people involved because people like to see people and not so much a microscope. And that is kind of how we chose them but we didn't have a huge selection to pick from. And then this, what was the second part of the quite how did I like source the images or figure out the images. That was your muted. How were the images selected and were you worried the images may change the perception of the ETDs. I didn't really even think about but now that you bring it up it's a really good point like will it change it. Because I didn't read the entire ETD to pick the photos like we only we looked at the titles and the abstracts which is what I gave the student to pick them. I didn't use all of the images the students picked because some of them weren't very good. So I would go pick out other ones, but they were based solely on whatever information was in the title and the abstract. So that is how we picked them and it was just like searching for keywords that were kind of in the title and abstract on on sites where everything was CC licensed so that I could use the photos. So that's kind of how I picked them and I did not think about how it might change the impact of the thesis but I'm curious now if it did but that'd be hard to be hard to collect data on that I think that's a good question. That I'm sorry that your audio for me went really in and out and I couldn't understand that. Oh, is it about the poster and I'm sure that I can give it later and I can also just provide a link in the chat to it right now if that's what the question was here I will stop sharing it. That is a link to the poster that's in the chat now. Awesome. And I think we're at time so I just want to say thank you everyone for staying and listening.