Social Media Policy as a Tool for Building Users' Trust and Enhancing the Corporate Reputation of Academic LibrariesinNigeria : Views of Librarians

Abstract

The study seeks to understand how academic librarians strive to create trust and credible information on the online forums (social media) through establishing dependable social media policy in three university libraries in Nigeria. Qualitative data gathering technique, employing a case study research design was adopted for the study so that the researcher can make meaning of a phenomena from the participant’s perspective. Focus group discussions and face-to-face inerviews were used for data collections with eigtheen (18) academic librarians as participants. From the participants’ responses, four themes emerged in the quest to explore the uniqueness and presence of social media policy in establishing trust and reputation for social media platforms in the academic libraries, viz: Non-policy, Nucleus policy, Contents of social media policy, Benefit of social media policy; but there were debated answers on the non-existence of social media policy as deduced from the participants’ responses. However, participants still supported the notion that there are elements of social media policies which were meant to uphold the social media applications for the academic libraries in the 21^st century. In conclusion, it was found that to create social media trust and discard fake news, there had to be academic librarians’ personal or collective efforts to engage the users in the social media platforms. The paper recommended that academic librarians needed to maintain credible online policies for social media to triumph; they needed to sustain users’ information needs in the academic libraries and be proactive

Keywords: Social Media; Social Media Policy; Academic Libraries; Trust and Reputation

Corresponding Author: J. S. MAGOI (PhD), Kaduna State University, magoijoshua@gmail.com