The Use of Facebook and Twitter in School Libraries

I typed in "school libraries" on the search bar on Facebook and I was surprised at the small amount of results it yielded. There was several results from other countries but very few from the United States. That is not to say they are not useful to look at though. After some scrolling I saw a few schools that caught my eye and I decided to look into them a bit further.

The first was an elementary school in North Carolina named Tryon Elementary.
Tyron Elementary

It seemed like a page that was meant more for parents and teacher that work at thats school. Based on their posts it looked like it was updated often and I really liked that it kept parents updated on upcoming events using the Facebook events feature.

I decided to check out pages for high schools. From the three that I saw I noticed they catered more to  the students they serviced rather than their parents or even the faculty at school.

Carmel High School's Library in Indiana focused on demonstrating how the students used the library. I was pleased to see they often held contests for students to win reading materials. Contests like that definitely bring in more students to the library.
Carmel High School

I was very happy to see my old high school have their own Facebook page and to see that it is updated quite a bit. It mostly showcases activities that their book club members take part in. I also really liked that they showed their monthly book displays. I'm very glad to see this since I definitely know this was not around when I was a high school student.
Martin High School

Overall the pages I saw had great content but it seems it may be overlooked. Most of the posts had not comments and just a few likes. The advantages of using Facebook is that you can publish lengthier posts, more pictures and also use features such as Events to promote things going on at school. The disadvantage of Facebook is that it doesn't seem to reach that big of an audience or at least that is what I saw from the lack of likes and comments on all the posts from the mentioned pages. All of them could benefit from more promotion of their page since most had great contents that their intended audience is missing out on.

As for Twitter I personally feel it would be great to showcase what is being done in the library and share quick tidbits of upcoming events and activities going on. The drawback is that in the area I work at I know Twitter is not a commonly used social network. In this case a parent meeting/training might be beneficial.

Looking at Kathy Schlock's Twitter page I felt a bit out of touch with all the new technology that is out there that can actually be integrated into classroom lessons. The posts featured some of the latest gadgets which included some I hadn't heard of before such as this

https://twitter.com/kathyschrock/status/775059602857754624

By far one of my favorite people to follow is The Daring Librarian. She always comes up with these innovative ways to incorporate idea and technology in the school library while still making it enjoyable and fun for librarians, teachers and especially students. I have followed her for some time now and always refer to her when I am completing assignments and am completely stumped.

There are many ideas, people and technologies that can inspire us to do more for our schools, libraries and our students. I cannot wait to share these ideas with my school librarian. I will also keep them in mind for when I become a librarian too.