Final Project Outline: Twitter and Academic Libraries

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Final Project Outline (Formatted as Tabs on a WordPress blog):

Starting your own Twitter Profile- Creating a Handle, adding your information, and adding a picture
Using Twitter- Character Limits, Hashtags, and tweeting at other users
Uploading other forms of media to Twitter

Students are most likely to follow Academic Libraries on Twitter (Sewell), (Kim)

In today’s world, a large portion of marketing is done through social media, especially to the younger generation

Twitter is a great way to introduce students to the library collection or events (Baker)
Twitter gives students the opportunity to interact with library staff- this can provide a great way to answer simple reference questions or gauge how students feel about the library (Forrestal) (Matthews)
Twitter can be a great tool and librarians can push the boundaries of how they use the technology- one example would be a librarian using Twitter to engage with a class (FIlgo)

Language- Many libraries tend towards formal language because of the nature of the institution you represent. It’s important to have a conversation about tone (Aharony)
Educating librarians on how to properly engage with the Twitter technology- this means using hashtags and taking advantage of all the features to their fullest extent (Cvetkovic) (Darcy)
Frequency- Most students follow a lot of people on twitter, so it’s important to Tweet fairly frequently to make sure your posts are being seen
Content- When conducting my interview with an academic librarian who helps to run their twitter, she spoke a lot about the struggles of coming up with content. It’s important to have a number of people contributing to coming up with content and brainstorming ideas of what should be tweeted and when.

LIS 644 - Digital Tools, Trends, and Debates