Masters of Art / Social media has become a popular tool adopted by libraries and play a major role in marketing library services, facilitating communication between libraries and staff, and assisting libraries in connecting with communities. The use of social media by City of Cape Town Libraries has been recently established, and it has not yet been adequately assessed how Librarians have taken to this new implementation. Literature revealed that there is not enough research done in assessing Librarians’ perceptions on the use of social media for library work purposes, especially as a tool that is used to provide information services to users, and also how users responded to libraries’ adoption of social media in meeting their information needs.

The purpose of this study is to contribute with a survey of how Swedish public libraries are using social media in their work. The study also provide insight into how the Swedish public libraries worked with social media during the corona pandemic. There are four research questions: How do Swedish public libraries use social media in their operation? What kind of posts do Swedish public libraries post on social media? How do librarians relate to social media as a work tool? Have Swedish public libraries changed their strategies for how they work with social media during the pandemic? Prior research is divided into seven paragraphs starting with what applies to public libraries and municipalities when it comes to communication.   The theoretical framework is made up of a combination of relationship marketing and communication theory. The method used in this study is a semi-quantitative survey supplemented by a qualitative content analysis. The result shows that the Swedish public libraries use social media. The main purpose of social media for the Swedish public libraries is marketing of the public library´s services and events. Few of those who worked with social media had any formal education other than shorter courses. Librarians are generally positive about social media, but not everyone contributes with ideas about content to post on social media or participate in the posts. Many reported that they had more time for social media during the corona pandemic and they got to be creative in creating posts when much of the regular operation was discontinued. However, there were also those who reported they had nothing to post during the corona pandemic and they used social media less. During the pandemic, when borrowers and visitors no longer came to the libraries to the same extent, public libraries focused on customer relationships and relationship building. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.