Humorous Academic Library Messaging on TikTok & Instagram

Abstract

This study explores how academic libraries use humor to communicate their value and services to their university community through social media. This study is a content analysis of posts created by a sampling of seven academic library Instagram and TikTok accounts. The study reviews and categorizes the multiple types of humor present among the particular content analyzed by looking at the combinations of humor types and then separating them out for individual analysis. This analysis shows that while Comparison and Silliness humor types were the most prevalent in the social media posts reviewed, Exaggeration received the highest average numbers of likes and comments. Sarcasm received the second most average likes, while Comparison received the second highest average number of comments per post. These findings suggest that expanding the usage of Exaggeration, Sarcasm, and Comparison in library social media content strategy could encourage engagement from audiences.

Keywords

• academic libraries
• social media
• library marketing
• social media marketing
• communication