Learning 2.0 - Twittter (Thing 15)

Hee, hee!  I have a Twitter account!  I found the process of setting up an account to be relatively painless, but it was a bit daunting to come up with people to follow as part of the set-up process.  Luckily, most of the blogs I looked at for my RSS Feed post are by people who have Twitter accounts, and I also found some people and organizations to follow from the UELMA article.  I also added a few authors to my personal feed.  Figuring out how to add a Twitter feed widget to my blog wasn't necessarily intuitive, but a quick Google search led me to some good tutorials.

I found the article "How Librarians Can Leverage Twitter" to be very helpful in suggesting easy ways to implement and use this new (to me!) form of social media into the library.  Here are a few ideas:

Report Library Happenings - This is probably the main way I was thinking of using Twitter.  I thought about sending tweets about new books, special program reminders, contest winners, and upcoming book club meeting dates.  I also liked Burkhardt's suggestion about letting patrons know about unusual occurrences such as early closures or machines being down.

Sharing Recommendations - I also liked the idea of having kids tweet book recommendations to the library and then embedding a widget on the library's website for the tweets.

Build Community - I hadn't thought using Twitter for building community ties, but I liked the ideas about retweeting information from students and other patrons about upcoming community events or interesting content.

Engaging Users - Burkhardt also talked about helping users with library questions.  In this article, he talks about setting up tweet alerts using the advanced search feature in Twitter in order to alert you to library related questions from users in your area.  You could also share articles about authors, the importance of school libraries, or the positive effects of reading with your followers.