Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

 

Social media has become a huge part of everyone's daily life, not only do we use it to be "social" but to enrich our minds with great information.  Believe or not, I have not been on Facebook very long, probably for about 1 year and I've had a Twitter and Instagram account for a couple of days, but I never really "tweet". Instagram is another app that I have not used at all but I am interested in learning about it. 

From these social media accounts, I feel more comfortable using Facebook, I think this is because I have used it longer.  I have recently started using Facebook but only for groups that dedicate themselves to 3d printing, prop making, Star Wars memorabilia, vr education, and school technology ideas. I left the app couple of months because I found it to be meaningless.  Hundreds of friends but no true camaraderie. Nevertheless, these apps are great resources for information and ideas. I also started to use my Twitter and Instagram account on which I follow lots of teachers and tech engineers. Whichever social media you choose to use, you can spend hours navigating through them and easily lose track of time, so as librarians’ social media is a great tool to reach out to students and pull them into the library and to library websites.  

Twitter, one popular social platform that I navigated for this couple of days. It has definitely enriched my life as a future librarian.  As I slowly began to use Twitter more and more this summer I found that Twitter is more popular with adults than with young adults.  Twitter is great for us adults to interact and learn about things that are popular in our profession, in our case, libraries.  This platform is great for interacting with other professionals with only a sentence of two.  It gets the message across without taking much of our time to read the "tweets". This spring I started to follow Cynthia Alaniz @utalaniz who an elementary school librarian and a blogger is.  I highly recommend you all follow her.  She tweets and retweets great reads, book recommendations she makes to her students, and great library ideas. She was chosen by Todd Nesloney (a principal) as one of the 12 educators worth following.

Cynthia Alaniz‏ @utalaniz

There are other interesting people I started to follow on Twitter who will help me grow as a future librarian.  One of those is Kathy Schrock @kathyschrock is an amazing person to follow, she is huge with technology.  As soon as I clicked on her name, I found a pinned tweet with a great link that I can use to teach.  Since we currently have some iPads in our classrooms and this site has pages that provides tips, tricks, resources for teaching and learning with the iPads.  

Pinned Tweet

Kathy Schrock‏ @kathyschrock  

I am so excited about following these people on Twitter and I definitely know that using Twitter is a great way to stay up to date on current and popular books to have in the library.

Jorge Paz @blessedjpaz

 

Instagram is a social media app that I am not familiar with, I do have it on my smart phone.  I know after learning more about this app that I will enjoy sharing pictures, Instagram allows you to request followers and view the pictures your followers post.  There are people you follow and followers, you can choose to keep it private or public and it can be linked to your Facebook account so what is posted on your Instagram can also be posted on your Facebook instantly.  I created a new Instagram account for the purpose of this class and think it would be a great idea to have an account as a librarian.  It would be a great way to share pictures or information of great things happening in the library.  Followers could be the teachers, students, administrators, and other librarians/libraries and of course everything that is posted has hashtags.

What can I say about Facebook that you all don't already know, I found that using Facebook would be a better social platform to draw students in and to grab their attention.  Facebook is also a great way to stay in contact with parents, if they follow our school library on Facebook, they will definitely see my posts.  This social platform is also a great way to stay connected with other libraries, promote services and activities, and post photos of things that are happening in our library.  As I searched on Facebook for school libraries, I found three great libraries.  I went into the Vanguard Academy Facebook page and found they post very often, most of their post are on the latest activities happening with the school and the library, they also posted pictures of their first patron of the year on the first day of school.  I found this to be awesome because many elementary school libraries don't open their libraries until two weeks after school starts.  The latest post had been many pictures of them celebrating 20 years of the Harry Potter Magic.  I found many other libraries, mostly high school libraries. These libraries had many posts in common, posts on their football season, posts of their library activities, and post on popular and new book recommendations.  These libraries overall posted often, but I did notice they did not have comments on their post and did have only few likes.  Overall, I think libraries having Facebook pages is a great idea and I am excited to create one when I become a librarian.  Using these social medias or platforms is a great way to stay connected with patrons, colleagues, and it is an amazing way to grow professionally.  I think that there would only be one disadvantage when using Facebook, Twitter or Instagram from campuses, I have found that there are filters that do not allow access to this social media, so it would have to be accessed outside the campuses. Overall, I am excited to become a librarian and use these social platforms in my library.