I think I will always be a social media newbie....sure, I have this blog, I send out Tweets and Facebook posts to multiple pages, manage more than a few websites, send text messages, send emails, and have an account at pretty much every social media site I can find. But I'm still trying to figure out an efficient way to manage these multiple social media sites, which ones to use, how to use them, and how not to use them. Here's the list of what I have learned (so far).
1. I need to know what my purpose is for each social media site/account. My Facebook account is for my connections with family and friends. No students here and only a few colleagues. But I have Facebook pages (MHS Library, IHSBOB) that are for students and staff; the posts here are to share information with them. This blog is a way for me to professionally share information with students and staff at my school, and other librarians. It also is a way for me to reflect and archive what has worked and what has not. I need to define a purpose (professional, personal) and the targeted audience for each site/account.
2. Don't confuse purposes. I keep up a Bobcat Book of the Day where I send out a quote each day. I was posting this on blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages and I've found the daily posting has simply overtaken some of these pages. The posts on this blog, for example, are buried by these daily quotes. Blogger doesn't allow subpages (not really, anyway) and despite my efforts to sort these BBOD entries, they were still clogging up the blog. Enough of that...I've stopped. I also need to keep remembering the audience I am targeting...if it's students and staff at my school, the posts need to be relevant to them.
3. You CAN over-post the same information. Someone once told me when you post something, you should do so to multiple platforms...and multiple accounts. OK, I tried that and quickly became very tired of reading the same posts over and over.
4. You CAN over-post to the same platform. It's just my opinion, but I think if you tweet more than 5-10 times in one day, you should get a blog. I follow about 140 folks on Twitter and am finding that some folks are tweeting so much that I can't follow the tweets of the folks that tweet moderately. I now try to make sure I never tweet more than a few times per day. And I'm going try to make them count. How many folks really want to know where I am eating dinner? I thought hashtags would be the answer here, but multiple posts and retweets end up with my feeds saying the same thing over and over.
5. Not every communication needs to be public. I've noticed some folks tend to reply to others publicly. Really? Don't all of the social media sites offer direct messages? When I need to communicate something with only one other person...and others really won't benefit from a public tweet, I'll use direct message.
6. Social Media Managers are life-savers! HootSuite, TweetDeck, and others can really save me time when posting information to multiple sites....of course, because of number 3, I'm more careful of what I send where, but I often want to post the same information to my library's Facebook and Twitter pages....and sometimes need to schedule these for a later date.
So, like any new learning....I'm still learning, becoming a bit more selective in what I read, who I follow, what I post, and where I post it. I'd love to hear what is working for you (or not working)!
