I created my twitter account (@ChrissyLJohnson) a month ago, but I finally forced myself to become active on it for the first time yesterday. I tweeted a few things, found some people to follow, and searched for an app to use with my smart phone. I also did a bit of reading on the twitter site about the use of #hashtags, @mentions, and other twitterisms. After spending a few hours on all of this, I came to my own conclusion that twitter is not as banal as I originally thought it was; also, it seems to serve a different function than I thought it did. I have thought for years that I had no need for twitter since I use facebook. Upon signing into twitter for the first time, it simply looked like a much more stripped down version of facebook. You find friends, you tell them what you are doing, they tell you what they are doing, and you converse about it. In trying to find people to follow on twitter, I didn't care to follow anyone I was already friends with on facebook since I get status updates, links, and personal information from their facebook account. I did, however, find myself looking for companies and organizations to follow, such as my church group, my undergraduate college, my favorite NFL team, and my favorite breakfast place. In theory, I don't really care about having access to a complete profile and photo archives of SJSU SLIS, but I would like to be notified if they have anything they feel is important enough to tweet. The same goes for other businesses, groups, and organizations. I would also like use hashtags to contribute to a bigger conversation through my tweets if I feel the need. I have decided that for me, facebook is for friends and family, and twitter is for companies, organizations, and the occasional celebrity tweeter (c'mon--who can refuse the entire cast of the Office on twitter?).
From this vein of thought, a multi-branch library system like the Multnomah County Libraries in Portland might not be able to do a lot with facebook in terms of posting, keeping up with comments, and replying to inquires. Perhaps they could choose to create a page on facebook so that it's present but use twitter to update through twitter and link profiles with facebook to also update on that site. In this way, patrons can find them on two of the most popular social networking sites, but the effort is really only going into twitter for the most part and facebook for the occasional profile revamping.
This idea might be too simplistic if an organization or library really wants to delve into social software, but for those who find the idea of being everywhere at once overwhelming, this is a fairly simple possibility.
I did same thing with my Twitter account, since I interact with all my friends and family on Facebook. In a way, I kind of like the anonymity I have on Twitter. I feel like I can tweet things (like LIS links and resources) that the people on my Facebook page could probably care less about.
ReplyDeleteHi! I really liked the idea of the difference between twitter and facebook, and seeing how one could make comments about all sorts of things on twitter. Although, I think I could make the same comments on Facebook. But you are absolutely right about the anonymity. There is a bonus to saying stuff to a limited amount of people who would be interested in my tweets. My only question then becomes whether twitter serves an important enough function, or whether the same function could be served just as easily on a blog. I would think that you could say more, and still retain your anonymity on a blog rather than be limited to the size of a tweet. Also, I have found far too many people who tweet about every little thing to make me feel like a user on Twitter could be saying something more important on it than any other social site.
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