January 22, 2017

Being a Savvy Social Media User

iconsRecently my colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura noted a blog post that demonstrates effective traits for using social media on behalf of an organization. Titled “Social Change”, the post documents the choices that Brooklyn Museum staff made recently to pare down their social media participation to venues that they find most effective. As they put it:

There comes a moment in every trajectory where one has to change course.  As part of a social media strategic plan, we are changing gears a bit to deploy an engagement strategy which focuses on our in-building audience, closely examines which channels are working for us, and aligns our energies in places where we feel our voice is needed, but allows for us to pull away where things are happening on their own.

This clearly indicates that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to simply get an account on every social media site out there and let’er rip. For one reason it is highly unlikely that your organization has the bandwidth to engage effectively in every platform. Another is that without the ability to engage effectively, it’s best to not even attempt it. Having a moribund presence on a social platform is worse than having no presence at all.

Therefore, being a savvy social media user means consciously reviewing your social media use periodically to:

  • Identify venues that are no longer useful to you and either shutdown the account or put it on ice.
  • Identify venues that you find useful and maintain or increase your use of those venues.
  • Consider whether the nature of your engagement should change. For example, should you use more pictures to make your posts more engaging? Should you craft messages that are more intriguing than informative, thus potentially increasing visits to your site?

Kudos to the Brooklyn Museum for doing this right. Read the post, and understand what it means to be a thoughtful social media user. We should all be so savvy.

 

Image courtesy of Brantley Davidson, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

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Roy Tennant About Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.
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