Social Media

 Since 2003 when I got my first invitation to join Facebook, I have been a social media user. We now have seen social media go from just status posts and cute pictures to a way to market ourselves and whatever industry we are in. As librarians using different social media platforms can be a powerful tool. It is important to show our value to the community and a quick and easy way to do that is through social media. 

Facebook has been around for 2 decades now which means those that first started using it as teens and young adults are now parents with school-aged kids. This is the primary market for Facebook. You won't really find this as a way to engage your students but it can be a great tool to show parents what the library is all about. In the library pages, I found on Facebook most were using the page to inform followers what activities they had going on in the library. They also used it to advertise events like book fairs and book clubs. One school even does a daily storytelling broadcast with students. I noticed the more student-centered content the more engagement, for example, the videos of students performing had many more views and likes than a post about an upcoming event at the school. I created my own page for my school library. One thing that is nice about the big social media platforms is that you can push content to all of them at the same time with a single post so it saves you time and you can build content faster. 

Maplebrook Elementary Library Facebook 

Twitter is the social media platform used the most in the education world from my research. There is no shortage of great education technology leaders out there sharing their wealth of resources. The ed-tech leaders that I enjoyed the most on Twitter were Kathy Schrock, Gwyneth Jones, and Jim Lerman. They are active on Twitter so there is a lot of content to peruse. I like how Kathy shared simple apps for designing digital content. Gwyneth shares sites that are fun and useful along with book reviews from both herself and other librarians. I was excited to see she had retweeted my mentor, Brooke King. Jim Lerman posts education articles and lesson plans. His resources do take a little more work to get to but they are valuable information. My Twitter handle is @mbe_library if you would like to follow me. 

Instagram is where you are going to get the most student engagement. And if you really want to try to engage students through social media then now Tik Tok is the way to go. I am not brave enough to try Tik Tok but there are some great educators out there on it. Instagram is engaging to students because there is always a visual that goes along with whatever content you are posting. In elementary students love to see themselves so making them a part of the social media platform you are using will encourage engagement. All social media platforms are useful for furthering the mission of the library if you are willing to put in the time and effort to write content and engage with users.