Digital Library Content in the Social Web: Resource Usage and Content Injection

Providers of digital non-mainstream content face two major challenges. First, they have little knowledge about the usage of their content in social media channels, which is necessary to improve dissemination strategies. The second challenge is how to bring the content to interested users, who do not know their portals. We present two case studies for analysing and injecting content into social media channels. More specifically, we analyse the usage of scientific literature from the domain of economics in blogs and tweets that are related to the field of economics. Additionally, we present two mechanisms for injecting content into blogs or tweets, by the means of a Wordpress plugin and a Twitter bot respectively. The usage analysis shows that the resource coverage is rather low in the investigated social media channels (~0.15% in tweets and ~0.5% in blogs). Using a Twitter bot for content dissemination is feasible, but not advisable because the automatic approaches are quite hard to optimise towards Twitter's usage policy. For content injection into the blogosphere the Wordpress plugin shows promising results in a qualitative user study. Our results indicate that content injection into social media channels is a promising way for content dissemination and point towards a preference of blogs over twitter as target channel.