Social networks: Facebook and Twitter

Social networks have changed the way society exists.  Can we imagine what life was like before Facebook or Twitter?  Social networks have brought us a way to stay in touch with family members, school friends we haven't seen in years and new contacts we meet on a daily basis.  The ultimate goal of social media sites is connecting people to other people.

So let’s compare Facebook and Twitter.  How do they compare to each other? Both involve statuses to see what people are thinking or doing, and both can follow celebrities, friends, groups, organizations, and pages.  But they differ from each other in the following ways: Facebook is more personal with people sharing their life events through unlimited length updates and photo albums with the people they are friends with while Twitter has a 140 character length update limit, following thoughts of people and topics known as “tweets”.  On Twitter, you don’t have to be friends with people to see what they are saying about certain topics because of hashtags and you can follow trending topics.  Facebook has apps, games, chat options, and planning events while Twitter does not have these options.  Twitter is like a diary or journal while Facebook is like a scrapbook of your life.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter can be beneficial to libraries and librarians by connecting them to their patrons but it is important to come up with a plan of how to connect to patrons using these platforms.  Facebook is a great way to advertise programs or popular new books/media that have arrived at the library while a librarian using Twitter could be tweeting during the actual program giving thoughts, quotes or details of what is occurring.  Last year at the Indiana Library Federation’s CYPD (Children and Young People’s Division) Conference, tweeting was a fun and engaging way to find out what other librarians were thinking about the authors, speakers and workshops. 

Obviously social networks are here to stay and library and information science professionals need to strategize how to best implement these platforms into daily use.