Thing 12: Twitter and Facebook

Facebook and Twitter are two of the hottest social networking websites out there right now. And libraries should not only be aware of them, but using them! Free PR, people! Facebook was launched on 2004 and it's a free-access website allowing users to join specific networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves.

Facebook lets you communicate with Friends in several ways. Because the site broadcasts your messages to all your friends, think of it like a community bulletin board. You can also send private messages directly to friends. Facebook has a chat featuretoo, so if you're Facebook friend is online, you can chat in real time! Another fun feature on Facebook involves adding and sharing pictures. Friends can view, comment, share and tag specific photos.

To make sure that your Facebook page is seen by only those who are invited, you must manage your privacy settings. Those settings control who can see you and your information. And a common complaint these days is that Facebook is constantly changing the privacy settings making it difficult for people to keep up with who can see what. So that's something to keep patrons and families who use it at your library aware of.

Libraries all over are using Facebook for free PR! Organizations and companies can have their blogs and Tweets fed into their FB page which cuts down on the time you might think keeping all of those sites updated. Check these library Facebook pages out:

• Brentwood Library's Children's Corner
• Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
• Frankfort Public Library
• Kansas City Public Library
• ALSC is even on Facebook!

If you're not on it yet, sign-up and connect with Kelley from the CATC Committee!



Now Twitter is a strange little bird. While it's also a social networking site, it's drastically different from Facebook. It's considered a microblogging service, meaning users send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of a mere 140 characters. Here's another brilliant introduction by CommonCraft.

So, why don't you join Twitter!

1. go to Twitter and click Sign Up Now.
2. Enter your name, username, password, e-mail address, and security text. Click Create my Account.
3. Click Skip This Step on the next two pages.

Once you have created your account, configure your account settings like your Name (how it will appear to others,) your Username, Time Zone and create a One Line Bio, add your Location and more. Once you're there - you need to build a following and start following others. You can start by following Kelley from the CATC committee if you'd like (though I use Facebook more often.)

Onto Finding People to Follow: When you follow another Twitter user, those tweets appear on your home page whenever one is sent out and on your cell phone/pda/smartphone device if you choose. Twitter can search your e-mail accounts to find friends that you may want to follow. Here are a few library-related people you might like to follow:

• Nicole Engard
• Jen Robinson (from the great Jen Robinson's Book Page children's literature blog)
• Helene Blowers (who was the originator of this here 21 Things project we're doing!)
• Jenny Levine (of the Shifted Librarian fame)
• The ALSC blog
• Michael Stephens (from Tame the Web)

If you would like to find people to follow through a web e-mail account - click Find People and follow the instructions. You can also follow people based on your own interests - On the Twitter home page, click the Search box and type in a term that is of interest to you.

Twitter also employs something called hashtags - which work in a similar way as tagging photos - it's a way of categorizing tweets. When you Tweet, you can include a kind of Twitter-Dewey-Decimal Number like #followfriday or #ff (they are always preceded by the # symbol.) So out there in the Twitter world, there are a million hashtags. Anyone can create one. And it's encouraged interesting conversations to all happen in one place. They're helpful too! Fridays are often a good day to find new people to follow due to the #ff or #followfriday hashtag. It's a suggestion of another person to follow. And every Tuesday there is an online discussion on twitter using the hash tag #educhat and one about ebooks using #dbw (digital book world) throughout the week. Some folks use the lists feature on twitter to track and follow librarians and you can subscribe to other created lists without having to create your own.

Most organizations you can think of are using Twitter, and libraries are using it in some amazing ways as well. Kansas Librarian and technology guru, David Lee King has a number of great posts on his blog about libraries and Twitter:

• Wiki on what libraries are up to on Twitter
• School Library Journal has a great article (including great Librarians to follow!) on what Twitter means to libraries

If you're hankerin' for more, there are plenty of other social networking sites as well, in fact, the NYTimes just published an article about many of them.

Have fun connecting on Facebook, Tweeting and making other discoveries!