Thursday, June 2, 2011

Content Creators: Be Creative!

Are you a librarian or a medical librarian? Do you use Twitter? Does your library has a twitter account or a Facebook page? As one of the content contributors to our Reference Department's twitter account, library's blog, Flickr, and Facebook page, I constantly felt it is challenging and time consuming to keep the contents in these accounts rolling effectively and feeding it with relevant information quickly. Ideally, I wish our contents were updated while I'm sleeping...

A recent conversation with a librarian friend about feeding twitter account with RSS feeds on some desired topics. "Well, don't depend on those automatically feeds only. This is why you are here and you are the content creator." What he said really got me thinking. Yes, librarians are well known for being content creators in many ways including Web sites, subject guides, pathfinders, instructional materials, and library tutorials. Now content creators has evolved to include twittering, blogging, facebooking, and more. Librarians becoming digital content creators are the result of digital technology and digital reference services. The difference is digital content creators have to come up with contents in a quick and effective way.

If you are the person behind the scene, how do you manage your library's social media accounts to keep them fresh and relevant?

1 comment:

Katharine Widdows said...

Hi, sorry I'm replying so late to this post - I've just come across it by accident and it caught my attention. I manage the facebook and twitter accounts for the library I work at, and I use yahoo pipes to feed library blogs (from our services and from individual librarians blogging for work) into both. But also we get sent content suggestions from other teams and from our communications person. We also have a bank of pre-written tweets we can copy and paste from if we are short of new things to say.
I try not to over-post to facebook, it cant take as much posting as twitter - people just switch off the feed. But for twitter we try to post 2 or 3 times a day. We get a reasonable number of enquiries and comments via twitter, and obviously we respond to those as well.
I hope this is helpful - if a little late!