Adventures on Twitter

Posted February 26, 2020 by Sarah Callanan

Every so often at SLIS we have an assignment that I’m ambivalent about, and that has happened this week with LIS 453: Collection Development and Management’s Social Media Assignment.  In all fairness, I knew this assignment was coming before I even signed up for this class, as bloggers who have taken this class have written about it.  This week the Social Media Assignment was introduced–it is an assignment that will last the rest of the semester.  We have to create a Twitter account and use it to tweet about promotional events, publicity materials, collection displays, and other library-related things.  Lots of libraries and librarians use Twitter as well as publishers and other vendors, so this assignment is a great way to learn more about how they handle promotions and publicity.  However, I’ve never been really keen on the idea of having a personal Twitter account.  Professionally I’ve created publicity materials and items for social media accounts, and academically I’ve done a lot of analysis on social media, but I’ve never had my own personal Twitter account.  I understand and have participated in social media marketing–it is incredibly useful and effective.  I just haven’t been too wild about having my own Twitter account, so I’m not sure how I feel about this assignment.  On one hand, I think it is really relevant and useful, and could help me build a professional portfolio on Twitter.  On the other hand, I feel nervous because these tweets will be coming from me as a person–not from an organization, company, or brand–and putting your own personal thoughts out into the world can be scary!   I think that some of my ambivalence and nervousness will go away once I start tweeting more and more as the assignment goes on.

 If you want to follow my class’ Twitter adventures for the rest of this semester, our class hashtag is #lis453sp20!