Believe it or not, the image below is a graph of a social network. It is a network of every YouTube video tagged with the keyword "urban librarianship." Not "urban" or "librarianship," but the exact keyword phrase: "urban librarianship." It is a network of one. The vertex in the graph represents a single video on the topic of urban librarianship uploaded by the YouTube account belonging to Wayne State University's School of Library and Information Science (WSU SLIS).

Urban Librarianship

It appears that, as far as YouTube is concerned, SLIS has the market cornered on the "urban librarianship" keyword phrase. This sounds like a huge success! However, is "urban librarianship" a keyword phrase that is going to bring users and prospective students to watch the video? As a search term, "urban librarianship" could one day take off and become a phrase that users and prospective students go to when looking for information on the subject of librarian issues in a city setting. Since the field of urban librarianship is a newer field, though, that keyword phrase by itself is not going to bring a stream of users to the urban librarianship video SLIS has created. Also, with a very limited number of subscribers, the SLIS YouTube channel is not going to bring in many viewers on its own accord.

A potential recommendation for what the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) should try to accomplish is continue to produce significant content using the "urban librarianship" keyword phrase to strengthen the phrase's usefulness and to have that as a term that unifies their videos, blog posts, download, web pages and more, but SLIS should also focus on developing additional keywords that will bring other traffic to this urban librarianship video.

Libraries Keyword

The School of Library and Information Science has attached another keyword phrase to that video: "libraries". While the keyword is very appropriate to the subject matter, this specific keyword may have the opposite problem that the keyword "urban librarianship" has. The keyword "libraries" is everywhere, meaning the strength provided by attaching the keyword "libraries" to this video is very little; it will be lost behind the glut of other videos tagged with "libraries," many of which will automatically be more popular because they are produced by users who have a large YouTube following. SLIS tagging this video with the keyword phrase "libraries" is almost useless. To demonstrate this concept, a network of YouTube videos with the keyword "libraries" was mapped using NodeXL, using the same procedures as was previously done for the keyword phrase "urban librarianship." The social network image for the keyword phrase "libraries" is shown below.

The social network image above for the keyword "libraries" represents a network of 1,000 YouTube videos tagged with the keyword phrase "libraries." As an aside note, the urban librarianship video produced by SLIS WSU, even though it has the "libraries" keyword phrase, was not even picked up in this keyword sweep used to produce this image. This should demonstrate just how ineffective the keyword "libraries" is for sharing the "urban librarianship" video. The "libraries" keyword is too vague of a term to produce any traffic for the SLIS WSU YouTube account.

YouTube's default search filter is set up by "relevance". This is determined similarly to the way Google ranks web pages. For this reason, a user or prospective student searching for "libraries" is never going to be led to the "urban librarianship" video produced by SLIS. SLIS WSU would do well to come up with a better, more targeted set of keyword phrases that are related to the "Urban Librarianship" video but yet are not so commonplace that the fledgling SLIS YouTube account will be lost behind other, more established users and groups tagging their videos with the same keywords.

Library Trends Keyword

Because Urban Librarianship is a newer trend in the field of library and information science, a potential keyword phrase that may work and produce "hits" could be the keyword phrase "library trends". This keyword phrase is relevant to the "Urban Librarianship" video, is a term users and prospective students may come up with on their own, and is being used by other videos on the YouTube network, but is not so overused that SLIS will be lost. Below is a graph of the videos tagged with the keyword phrase "library trends."

Fourteen videos are using the keyword phrase "library trends". While this keyword does not return a great number of videos, it is better than the keyword phrase "urban librarianship." Also, the argument could be made that the keyword phrase "library trends" would be a more effective traffic driver than the keyword "libraries". If SLIS appends this particular keyword tag to the "Urban Librarianship" video, and produces an additional number of videos related to the initial "urban librarianship" video that can also be tagged with the same keywords, SLIS will be on their way to being seen as a thought leader in this expanding area of librarianship, and developing a stronger following of interested individuals. Given enough time, this could make "urban librarianship" into the strong keyword phrase that SLIS wishes it were right now.

Are you interested in more information on "Urban Librarianship"?

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Are you interested in learning more about how to perform analysis using "Social Networking Analysis" using NodeXL?

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Read more about Link Building: Understanding Keywords Using NodeXL.

Or, read about NodeXL at ... Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL)

What do you about think about "Understanding SLIS's Keywords Using NodeXL"? What keywords do you think would work?

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