Instagram, Facebook, Twitter for the School Library

I decided to look at how school librarians use some popular social media websites. Which one would be best to use as marketing and communication to the stakeholders?  Here is what I found: 

Facebook 

 

Librarians post events such as book clubs, book fairs, and reading competitions.  They also post book recommendations, national days, advertisements of author events on social media or local in person, students participating in various activities, book read alouds by the librarian and the author, illustrations with insightful captions about the love of reading, school wide happenings, messages about posted assignments, student work, photographs of the library layout and décor. 

 

There are usually not very many followers to the page compared to the number of students attending the school.  There are even  fewer likes to posts and not very many comments, usually there are none. 

 

Advantages of using Facebook to promote the library:   

·         has the potential to reach more stakeholders than a flier 

·         visuals are colorful and appealing 

·         stakeholders do not have to go to the library's website they can communicate in Facebook 

·         links to websites and YouTube can be easily added to a post 

Disadvantages of using Facebook to promote the library:  

·         students may not want to like the page because they do not want the school to have access to seeing what they post 

·         some stakeholders do not want to mix social with academic 

·         parents and staff would visit the page more than students 

View on Facebook's popularity going away:   

  

I have noticed over the last decade a decline in popularity for Facebook.  Fewer and fewer of my high school students are using it.  They say things like "Miss that is for old people, we use Snap Chat or Instagram mostly."  An article on the website The Independent says “Facebook has a ‘teen’ problem”. The article also states that "The site’s overall user base continues to grow, however, thanks to its increasing popularity among older people" (Millions of Young People Are Quitting Facebook, 2018).  So as far as Facebook's popularity is concerned, parents and other adult stakeholders of the school library are more prone to make use of the presence of the library here than students are.  Research suggests other newer more popular social networking sites like the ones my high school students mentioned, are more appealing to younger users. 

Twitter 

I looked at some of the biggest names in educational technology's Twitter pages to examine what they post and here is what I found: 

Kathy Schrock	@kathyschrock    Schrock covers all kinds of educational tech tools, explains and demonstrates how to use them, has many tools for all teachers and librarians.
Linda Braun	@lbraun2000  She appears to focus on the work of library media specialists and library programs, tweets are more about how to learn with educational technology, not a lot of tweets about specific gadgets or devices.  This is a tweet about an article that she wrote about how to move library services from teen centered to teen driven.  https://twitter.com/lbraun2000/status/1261050173179871232?s=20
Alan November	@globalearner  Alan November has many webinars and hosts a podcast where he discusses learning with many experts in the field of online learning and educational technology and how all of this is affected by social and environmental issues
The Daring Librarian	@GwynethJones  This librarian tweets book recommendations, messages to her students, information and opinions about various educational apps.  The information is geared towards library media specialists.
Jim Lerman	@jimlerman  Mr. Lerman Tweets about educational technology tools and the occasional social emotional help graphic, but when you click on the link, it takes you to another website  https://twitter.com/jimlerman/status/1260602728113373184/photo/1

Instagram

This is one of the most popular social media websites among students between the ages of 12-18.  The school library has the potential to get quite a lot of traffic here from them.  Instagram can be used for all things that Twitter and Facebook can be used for.  Instagram is more about visuals than text.  I have found Instagram to be not as user friendly as the others.  You can not upload YouTube videos into it and all videos uploaded can not be done on a desktop you can only use your phone.  Also, in order to add text to a picture or photo you must use another application and then add it to Instagram. 

 

On my Instagram account I posted a picture of a book cover with a caption describing in one sentence what I think about the book.  Librarians do this often on their pages. 

Check it out here:   https://www.instagram.com/p/CBjqmUVA84f/?igshid=1piu60jcovxff 

 

I posted a video in Instagram of a story time.  Often librarians read books to their students on the library’s social media page.  Again, for me this took some time to figure out.  Instagram is just not that user friendly to me.  I thought it came out okay.

See for yourself:  https://www.instagram.com/p/CBll4ilAyqG/

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram

As far as all three social media websites are concerned, they are all quite useful to marketing and communicating for school library programs.  Facebook will draw more adults rather than students to the page, it is very user friendly and easy to maintain in my opinion.  Anything you can do on a desktop you can also do with your phone or any other mobile device.  Twitter appears to catch the attention of more adolescents than Facebook, it is also very user friendly.  The only real draw back I see is that each Tweet can only be 280 characters long which is double the number of characters it was originally.  Most users do not see this as a draw back because “only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters” (“Twitter’s Doubling of Character Count from 140 to 280 Had Little Impact on Length of Tweets,” n.d.).  Instagram is the most popular of the three among younger users.  As I stated earlier, I think that this social media website is not as user friendly as the other two.  In addition to not being able to post pictures with text directly to the site, you cannot upload YouTube videos.

References

 

Advantages and Disadvantages. (2008, November 19). Social Networking for Libraries. https://networksocial.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/advantages-and-disadvantages/

Facebook losing its grip on young people, who are quitting the site in their millions | The Independent. (n.d.). Retrieved June 18, 2020, from https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-quit-young-people-social-media-snapchat-instagram-emarketer-a8206486.html

Twitter’s doubling of character count from 140 to 280 had little impact on length of tweets. (n.d.). TechCrunch. Retrieved June 18, 2020, from https://social.techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/