As those working in the digital humanities know, this field incorporates the use of digital tools and technologies with traditional humanities disciplines. These features center interdisciplinary work with a potentially global impact, which highlights the need for a form of effective communication between scholars, such as Humanities Commons.

This past semester I worked on a research project to learn more about Humanities Commons marketing strategy and its users, and presented my findings at Michigan State’s University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). Humanities Commons’ current marketing strategy is centered around celebrating core values through digital events such as Open Access Week.

Figure 1: Emilia Breuning, Communications Assistant (left) and Larissa Babak, User Engagement Manager at UURAF 2024.

This project focused on a week-long “Spring Cleaning”-themed campaign encouraging users to update their Humanities Commons profiles through social media. Data was collected from February 19 to March 22, 2024, through the Humanities Commons website, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Mastodon, and the monthly Commons newsletter designed in MailChimp. Although we tracked data for almost a full month, this primarily served as a control for gauging activity during the weeklong campaign from March 4-8. 

My main research questions included:

• Which Humanities Commons users responded to the campaign?
• Which social media platform received the most engagement?
• Which types of posts received the most engagement?

To develop this project, I used the Open Access Week campaign from October 2023, including the Deposit-A-Thon event, as an example for creating a posting schedule for this campaign. I also used Canva to make graphics and to design personalized captions for each post. The goal of this project was to analyze user profile edits, engagements, and impressions, and how to guide future campaigns to effectively communicate Humanities Commons through social media to the scholarly community to support interdisciplinary collaboration and awareness.

Figure 2: An example of one of the social media posts of the Spring Cleaning campaign. Captioned as “We are halfway through our #HCSpringCleaning Profile Spotlight!🧼Don’t know what to update your profile with? Try adding your publications, your other social media handles, or more about your favorite academic interests to your profile! Start here: https://hcommons.org/”

What did we learn about Humanities Commons user engagement?

The highest profile edits in the 5 week period were recorded on March 14, when our monthly newsletter was released, followed by March 6, the day of the Profile Spotlights. After removing outliers, the median campaign Profile Spotlights participant is in 4 groups, has made 0 CORE deposits and blog posts, follows 1 member, and has an account age of 4 years. Regarding user activity after the Profile Spotlights, 50% of participants were active in the following 3 weeks. The data shows participants either heavily or rarely use the website features, resulting in several outliers. This shows that Profile Spotlights participants were different types of active users and do not have many similarities.

Figure 3: A visual representation of engagement data collected from February 19 to April 22 2024 on X, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

Throughout our social media, the highest post engagements were recorded on March 6 and 14, while highest engagements per post were recorded on March 14, when our newsletter was released. The highest engagement was on Mastodon. It’s important to note that X social media activity does not follow the trends that Mastodon and LinkedIn do. Looking back on our previous Open Access campaign in October, engagement on both X and Mastodon have decreased. On X, Humanities Commons has not been able to receive its previous level of impressions and engagements since the Deposit-A-Thon. Meanwhile, Mastodon received more replies than ever before during the Profile Spotlights, despite having 10 times less followers than on X, exemplifying our close-knit community on Mastodon.

X Metrics	Deposit-A-Thon	Profile Spotlights
Organic impressions	6,049	3,889
Average impressions per post	265	214
Average engagements per post	3.64	2.34
Engagement rate	2.0193%	0.9141%

Figure 4: A table representing X metrics from the Deposit-A-Thon (October 26, 2023) and Profile Spotlights (March 6, 2024).

What are the main takeaways from this campaign?

A further analysis into activity on X would allow Humanities Commons to gain insight on how we can increase engagement to previous levels. It’s also important to prioritize the community we have built on Mastodon, as seen through the steady post engagement we have accumulated. This brings up the question of how Humanities Commons can continue to connect with and grow our Mastodon community through different types of posts. As indicated by the chart below, the average engagement varies per post. A further analysis into the tone, rather than content type, can improve the theme and voice of our future posts.

Figure 5: A visual representation of engagement data, sorted by average engagement per post on X, Mastodon, and LinkedIn, and content type.

How can we understand Humanities Commons users better?

We currently use our social media to achieve our goals of engaging with users as a means of generating Commons activity, amplifying the successes of our users, and increasing awareness of the work we do and its value. Effective communication on social media also fosters a sense of community, as shown on our Mastodon engagement.

We will be able to use the knowledge acquired through this campaign in future communications. Tracking profile edits and social media analytics before, during, and after the campaign helped us understand how and when we best communicate with our users. Measuring other user activity such as CORE deposits and joining groups during campaigns would help us gain insight on when to better serve our users, especially regarding activity patterns. Additionally, we learned that as we develop future campaigns, we should plan around the newsletter release to maximize engagement.

We value staying informed about and being shaped by our users. Posting content including images that align with values and interests of our users is an opportunity to gather feedback on what resonates with our audience. Our ultimate goal is to establish rapport with our active users, and through regular communications in a unified voice, we can create long-term connections with users who use and contribute to the Commons.