BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Myself and three other students were tasked with examining the social media practices of our department. We looked at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Instagram, then evaluated how they could be better managed to communicate with existing students, faculty, and alumni.

We eventually launched a survey to better determine the needs of those users, and wrote a paper summarizing our findings, which you can view here.

Social media is becoming more prevalent in today’s society and libraries should capitalize on the public's mass use of social media to make average citizens aware of their presence in the local community. The use of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can have a large impact when interacting with the community. When organizations develop local social media teams and implement a social media “best practices” plan, the results show that the majority of students using the UNCG LIS page find that it meets their needs, but only 13% actually interact with the social media accounts. Additionally, the research shows that social media ranks, in order of importance to the students and their access to information relevant to the department: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, and Wordpress.