Baptism by Twitter Fire

Posted April 22, 2019 by Katie Carlson

Somehow I never caught twitter fever. I’ve technically owned a twitter since 2013, but I’ve done very little in terms of operating it. Paging through the archive, I can tell I was stressed about starting college, because the summer of 2014 was by far my most active and angst-filled twitter period! Even so, I only tweeted 50 times.

I bring this up because my Collection Development and Management course (LIS 453) had a social media assignment due this week! We had to tweet about promotions, publicity, displays, and other relevant & useful information related to libraries. Some posts had to feature original content in the form of photos, while the rest could be exceptional retweets with commentary.

While I like taking photos and think I’m funny (sometimes), brevity has never been my strength. Starting this assignment, more often than not I was hitting (or going over) the 280 character limit. That meant making four or five drafts until the tweets were slimmed down and ready to post. According to this TechCrunch article, twitter’s limit used to be 140 characters! Apparently I was heavily contributing to the 1% of tweets that are 280 characters, as well as the only 12% that go above 140.

This social media assignment was a tough one for me! That said, I definitely got the hang of it. Below are two of my favorite tweets from this assignment.

If you want to see my ramblings (or just get an idea of a potential assignment), you can find me on twitter @Katie73508043 (largely because I missed the place in the mobile sign-up where I could customize my username when creating my ‘librarian’ twitter. Oops).