Applications of Mobile Social Media: WeChat Among Academic Libraries in China

This paper describes the application of the social media platform WeChat. It explores the use of this emerging mobile app using the official WeChat accounts of the top 39 academic libraries in China. The findings indicate that approximately one third of the libraries use WeChat as a marketing tool to promote collections and services for users. Most of the 39 libraries, however, are still using the most basic functions. Advanced functions urgently need to be adopted. The main uses of WeChat are general social networking services (SNSs) and automatic answering and interaction features, which include seeking and sharing information, user self-service, and keyword-identified reference auto-responders. The study uses six aspects of quality to evaluate the interaction and content delivered by WeChat. These include the volume of information, information content quality, concordance rate, frequency, self-service, and basic features. The experience of Chinese university libraries is used to provide recommendations for other libraries.