As social media continues to take over our lives, more and more people are turning to sites such as Facebook and Twitter in order to reach out to larger audiences, especially the students. It is interesting to see that so many school libraries have hopped on the bandwagon. Though there were definitely different amount of interaction on different school libraries, adding a library Facebook page can certainly be beneficial. Here is what I found:
Stroud Elementary School Library
Stroud Elementary librarians use their Facebook page in order to put out several different types of information. There were pictures of students towards the end of the last school year doing activities and choosing books. There were pictures of the beginning of this school year where teachers were out and about in the community visiting their students' families. The librarians even posted school related events on their page such as an ad for Meet the Teacher Night. In addition, they linked to the public library and provided readers with a copy of the public library calendar. Comments were steady throughout. It does not seem like a wealth of people pass through this page, but they comments are consistent. Most posts had at least 10 likes.
Clarksdale High School
Clarksdale High School librarians used their Facebook page in order to promote their sports teams such as the volleyball team, to showcase some of their bulletins (Chic-fil-a inspired door decor), to advertise books that are anticipated to be widely read in September by including links to outside articles, to advertise donations pages for certain teachers, and to provide readers with a little bit of humor in the form of memes. The traffic on this page seemed low, and the library's post were not highly "liked." Post ranged from about 2 - 6 likes throughout the page.
Several libraries had created a Facebook page, but they had not updated or posted to it for over two years or more.
All in all, I feel that this could certainly benefit students if it is promoted correctly and on a daily basis. Library Facebook pages could include school information such as event calendars, testing dates, contact information, bell schedules, library resources, links to articles that students and teachers could benefit from and would be interested in, and the list can keep on going. I imagine it would be a bit tedious to keep the Facebook page updated, but anything for the sake of student learning and promoting the use of the library's resources.
