Hello All!
I am going to be exploring three different social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and how they can enhance library services. Social Media has been beneficial to me on my campus. It allows me to make connections beyond the campus and district to learn from and share information and ideas with others. Not only do I learn a vast amount of information it also allows me to share my ideas with others and help them.
Facebook is a social media platform that allows users to share images and text with others. Facebook is available as an Android app, iOS app and can also be used on the web. There are a lot of library and librarian pages on Facebook, some are listed as "Pages" and some as "Groups." When I was searching through the pages and groups I noticed many promoting reading challenges, book fairs, book talks, and book giveaways. Viewing these posts gave me great ideas on what I would post if I were to create a Facebook page for my campus' library.
The advantages I found for using Facebook is that it allows me to have interactions with other librarians. My campus library does not have a Facebook account, but our school district does have a district-wide Facebook account. On our district account, you can see what is happening at other campuses, upcoming events, and it allows the district to collaborate with the community members.
The disadvantages I found for using Facebook is that there are not a lot of comments left on the pages and groups and they are not being updated. It may be that the librarians that have Facebook pages don't have the additional support to help keep their page updated. It also seems that more adults are using Facebook than students/teenagers.
My overall, view on having a Facebook page is that it can help librarians advocate for their library and showcase all the amazing things that are not seen. Librarians can use Facebook to collaborate with other librarians not only in their community but around the world to share ideas.
Here are some examples of Facebook usage:
Twitter allows users to share tiny bits of written information with others. When you are writing information you are limited to a certain amount of characters in a Tweet and put to 4 images to share with your followers. My school campus library has a Twitter account and its post includes special events happening in the library, things happening on campus, student work, and makerspace ideas. Follow my campus' Twitter account: @rinamarie0
Using Twitter allows users to share ideas in a quick concise matter. Everybody loves information that is quick and to the point. There are many professionals, authors, and publishers on Twitter that you can learn a plethora amount of information from. It amazes me how educational leaders are willing to share their ideas with fellow community members. I also enjoy sharing pictures of things that I do in the library with my students and with teachers and tagging those in the picture. I get so happy when another librarian, author, or community member retweets one of my tweets. I find that even my student's parents are tweeting things from home because we have students that are virtual. I love using Twitter and find it easier to use out of Instagram, and Facebook.
Here are some wonderful resources that I found on Twitter:
Dr. Karin Perry @kperry
Dr.Terry Lesesne @professornana
