Varför sociala medier? : En undersökning av folkbibliotekens arbete med extern marknadsföring.

Sammanfattning: In our thesis we investigate how public libraries are working with external marketing via social media. The study aims to found out what the reasons are and how public libraries are using social media to market themselves. Furthermore, how they evaluate the success of these marketing efforts. We limit ourselves to public libraries and its staff. The theory that we have chosen to use to analyze our data is the marketing mix of the 4 P'S (product, place, price and promotion), but we have replaced the “price” with “staff” because “staff” is more relevant for library management. Our method is the semi- structured qualitative interview where we conduct interviews with four librarians in four public libraries. The result of the empirical interviews shows that all libraries began using social media to publish information. The idea is that all user groups can be reached by social media and that is their main reason for selecting this media. We also found that evaluation methods were different for each library studied. We found the evaluations to be lacking, if evaluation were even undertaken. We conclude that the reason for this is that there are no political guidelines, directives or marketing plan by local governments.