Into the Wild: My Adventures With Social Media

My experiences with social media are similar to my experiences in the great outdoors: I love to be outside and go for day hikes, but I draw the line at camping--give me the comfort of a B&B for the night please. In other words, I dabble. I lurk. I linger. But I'm not an active, deeply invested participant.

I've used Facebook for years, originally signing on so I could play Scrabble with a law school friend (and it is still my main use). I then realized that Facebook is a mostly enjoyable way to see what people who I know but don't see often, are up to.  
I have found Facebook to be good for one other thing: groups.  I'm part of several community and school groups. I also just joined a few library ones which are great: Future Ready Librarians and Fellowship of High School Librarians.  So many great posts and ideas.  I will definitely continue to haunt those, though I'm worried they could be a huge time suck!

Another form of social media I've used is blogs, especially when getting ideas for our high school library. I was already acquainted with The Blue Skunk Blog, The Daring Librarian and Adventures of Library Girl. This week I really enjoyed searching out others and found Joyce Valenza's School Library Journal blog, as well as Pernille Ripp's blog which has so many great posts.

As for other forms of social media, I know about them, mostly through my kids.  Instagram came first, when my oldest asked to get an account when she was in 7th grade (she ended up deleting it a few years later when she decided it was too distracting).  Vine was popular for a while but then folded.  Then came Snapchat with its dangerous, disappearing pictures.  And most recently TikTok which apparently none of them use but which is popular among their friends.  My high school senior uses twitter, but mostly it seems to follow political issues.

But, other than Facebook, I didn't use any of these apps myself.  So this week I took the plunge, signing up for Instagram and Twitter.  I have to say, I totally see the appeal of both.  It's nice to be able to be able to easily see posts from people who you care about or find interesting (like my daughter, my Twitter feed so far is mostly political news).  And I will talk again to my LMS about creating an Instagram account for our library. There are lots of times we want to reach students and let them know about new books, activities and such and right now the only way we can do that is through morning announcements so we leave that for the really important stuff. But one thing that concerns me is that the students get so many social media pings throughout the day, won't ours just get lost in the morass?