Social Media Starter Kit

Coral Sheldon-Hess, from the UAA/APU Consortium Library, knows her Facebook & Twitter! This past year, the UAA/APU Consortium Library decided to make an entrance into the social media scene. While not a how-to-do-it session per say, it was a how-we-did-it and what we have learned session. The audience was intensely interested in the Facebook details and the mission of being in the social media arena. There are quite a few differences between creating a site for personal use and a public page for an organization/institution. One big difference is that a public page can't "friend" anyone, so users have to find and friend the public page! So far the library has 190 friends.

UAA/APU wrote a plan before launching their social media sites – a good idea so there is a document to back up the thinking behind the idea! UAA/APU is unwilling to be boring! One interesting feature was photos of books being made into structures! They said that making time for posting is the hard part, so they used a team approach, having a different person assigned to post on different days. Facebook can be a motivator "If I don't do it, I can't post it!"

Thoughts about Facebook vs Twitter

• Twitter = chatty, 1x day minimum
  
• Facebook = 1 post/day maximum

In order to have multiple users post on one Facebook page, one of the users has to be the administrator of the page. One suggestion for beginners was to make a public page for your organization/institution and create a "sock puppet" account in order to see how to administer the account. A new feature of these public pages is that they can now talk to each other. I think everyone was going home to create their own library Facebook page!

Why is social media important?

• free
  
• proactive reference in Twitter via rss feeds
  
• responsive, reply to comments and posts
  
• not having a page is an organizational barrier