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| Top 12 Most Popular Social Media Sites in 2023 https://www.reviewsxp.com/blog/best-social-media-sites/ |
Howdy! Many of us recognize that social media has a tremendous effect on everyone now a days. Students, colleagues, parents, administration, and stakeholders alike are likely all on at least one social media platform for various reasons. And librarians can strategically use this to their advantage.
As J. Wilson (2017) points out, "our [librarians] impact isn't always apparent, and our roles are frequently questioned" (p. 16). But, we can display the media center's impact and increase visibility via social media! In addition, using social media in our school programs creates a learning experience that is more authentic and relevant to students lives (Jenson, 2019). I would also argue creating a consistent social media brand for your school goes a long way in constructing a healthy school culture - the media reflects the community culture and the media influences the community culture. The media center's social accounts should say, "This is who we are!" and "This is where cool things are happening."
All this is great, but "the integration of social media into online education, like all instructional design, is a challenge that requires planning, research, practice, and goal setting" (Jenson, 2019, p.27). My planning for the examples I am going to share started with a consideration of my potential and hypothetical users (I am not currently working in a school library). Although I do not currently have a specific community of users to collect data from now, I have noticed older adults and teenagers I know use Facebook very regularly. Therefore, I concluded the largest target audience for me would be Facebook since I am serving on multiple levels (students, other teachers, administration, parents, etc.). I also liked Facebook as my initial tool because it is easily linked with other accounts. My next step would be to link an Instagram account as it seems to be very popular with teenagers. This meta linking ability is a huge time saver because you are posting to both platforms at once. Below is my fake Facebook page for the Carolina Middle School Unicorns Media Center!
My goals in creating the social media tool I'm presenting here is to:
1. Make library programs and activities more evident to my administration, colleagues, parents, and students. In other words, the goal is to create a marketing campaign for the library to increase traffic and usage, while also advocating for the space and myself (Wetta, 2016).
2. To increase engagement and interactions with students and colleagues.
To achieve these goals, I needed to start with creating some fun visual content! For that, I used Canva. I appreciate Canva because it helped me create professional and appealing logos, banners, and promotional images that I could have never produced on my own!
As daily events and activities take place in the library, I would add additional content such as pictures of the students (with signed privacy permission forms of course), as well as collection highlights, book recommendations, ed-tech tools, games, movies, local activities, and much more (Wetta, 2016). These daily posts can result in more people acknowledging the library's value in the school. I want people who look at my posts to think, "Wow, she is really plugged in!" and "Boy, she is knowledge." Below are some screenshots of posts promoting the library commons, Stomping Grounds, and the library sponsored book club, Untamed Union.
I added a "Message" button to each post so users can comment for discussion or communicate with me directly with ease. Adding posts that ask for feedback explicitly would also encourage more discussion. For example, asking a simply question like "Do you prefer soda or tea in the commons?" or "Who is a woman you admire in honor of women's history month?" can get people engaged. Moreover, I like the ability to conduct online surveys for the media center with the help of social media so students have a voice in what happens in their space. Natural ease of use is very important because students have a tendency to compartmentalize their personal social life and their school life. Jenson (2019) called this concept the Personal-Educational Barrier. This principle applies to teachers too. Posts focusing on professional development for instance might read "What do you want to know more about in our next faculty meeting: Flipped classroom tools or assistive technology tools? Please post in the comments for suggestions." Adults like to feel and see their voices matter as well.
I hope you found this content helpful!
References
Jenson, L.J. (2019). Integrating social media into online education. In L.S. Green (Ed.), Librarians as Online Course Designers and Instructors (pp.27-30). American Library Association.
Wetta, M. (2016, February). Instagram now: Engage young users with the image-based social media tool. School Library Journal.
Wilson, J. (2017, December). Make your library more visible. School Library Journal.
Raegan, I want to come to your fake library!
ReplyDeleteSince you're looking at middle school, I liked that you picked a tool that you think will be frequently used by both students and adult stakeholders.
As you said, it truly is a marketing campaign. By using social media, we are advertising for our space and all that goes on there. We want to encourage others to "buy-in." To that effect, I love your branding! I used to work in a magnet school and they told us all the time "scream your theme" and that's what you've done here. I love that the name of the library is tied in with the school mascot. So creative!
Awe! Gosh, thank you Tiffany! As something who is new to the library world, you words of affirmation mean a great deal to me :)
ReplyDeleteRaegan,
ReplyDeleteI love that you took this assignment one step further by discussing using a variety of social media tools and linking them together to create one cohesive 'brand' for your school library! This seems like the perfect way to hit every stakeholder from parents on Facebook to students on Instagram. I'm even wondering if there's a way to link to LinkedIn for business partners to see. I also love how you thought about ways to make your social media interactive and more engaging such as asking questions for people to respond to. I have seen my own public libraries do this on Facebook and they sometimes even do give aways for right answers. This would be fun to do with parents to help connect them to the library more and even get them to visit in person.
Thank you so much for sharing,
Sam Howard
I bet community partners would help provide give away prizes too!
DeleteHi Raegan,
ReplyDeleteYour content is beautiful! Super eye-catching. For me, creating the logo for my fake library took the most amount of time this week. But you have taken it to the next level to create some really interesting posts. And the more we use these tools, the easier they will become second-nature to us.
I can see these posts printed out and used as flyers around your school, or used in the parent newsletter, too. Way to get the word out about your library!
Best,
Jennifer
These posts look fantastic! I am so impressed. I think you did a great job at using pretty much all that Facebook has to offer to create a compelling school library page. I really like having a space for feedback; that's a neat idea. Creating hashtags is also a good idea. This definitely looks like a good place for collaboration and advocacy.
ReplyDeleteHey Raegan,
ReplyDeleteI love your Facebook page; especially that the school mascot is based on a unicorn! All of your advertisements bring in your audience and gets us excited to see what will happen next. I like the feature of adding "message" to each post so you can allow collaboration between students and yourself. It is a great tool for you to use when you want feedback and possible new ideas!