Library Student Day in the Life – Round Two, Day Three

I interrupt your regularly scheduled blog posts to participate in Hack Library School’s Library Student Day in the Life.  For the week of October 28 – November 1, 2013, I will be posting each evening to share with prospective library students what a day in my life as a library student at Florida State University’s iSchool is like.  Regular posts will resume November 2, 2013.

Social Media Icons
Source: JNFerree on Flickr

Thoughts on what I have learned from my Social Media Management class

As I began writing my post for today (well, Wednesday, even though I will finish and post early Thursday morning), I was just going to do a quick bullet-point list with some of the things that happened at work today.  However, as my Social Media Management professor put so aptly just yesterday, “No one cares about us.”

I mean, technically this is supposed to be a post about what a day in the life of a library student is like.  So, theoretically, someone cares about what my day was like today.  But, no matter how hard I tried, as I was writing about my day, his voice was haunting me, making me think about how no one is particularly interested in reading a blog post about what happened to me today.

Even though this particular post is not one that I will submit as part of my final project, it is hard not to want to apply everything we have learned in class to this post, too.  What kind of headings and subheadings should I use for the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on this post?  What will draw the readers in?  What kind of feature image should I have?  How to balance a personal tone with a more professional tone on  a given topic?

What has changed about me after taking a class on social media?

• I have stepped outside my comfort zone.  Part of what I love about library school is that there are so many different aspects of librarianship.  In order to be a great librarian someday, I am going to need to push myself outside of my comfort zone sometimes.  This Social Media Management class?  Definitely outside of my comfort zone.

• I am (hopefully) beginning to develop a PLN.  Prior to taking this class, I had a Twitter account, but I did not really check it, nor did I follow that many people, and I certainly did not tweet.  Although I still do not tweet as much as many people (it hasn’t yet become engrained in me), I have started replying to people, retweeting things, and following a lot more librarians and libraries.  The people I follow give me great ideas and keep me in tune to what is happening in Library Land.  I think that is really important for me as a future librarian.  Also, developing relationships with even a few of these librarians would be great, too.

• I use a social media management application.  For all you HootSuite people out there, I like the owl logo.  I do.  I like how HootSuite integrates with Facebook.  But I don’t like sponsored tweets and I feel like the viewing area is less flexible than I would like.  I can see more columns in TweetDeck, and since my social media needs at this time are not so advanced that I need anything beyond TweetDeck, I’ll stick with it for now.  But I like that I have been exposed to both applications.

Honestly, who would have ever thought that I would even be using any sort of social media management application?  Both applications allow you to schedule your tweets, which is something I really like.  As I said, I am still getting used to tweeting regularly.  If I can tweet something that drives traffic to my blog (one of the main aspects of the class) when I’m not even thinking about it, great!  Also useful since most of the time when I think about tweeting, it is 2 or 3 in the morning and no one would ever see it.

• I think more consciously about clicking on links and visiting blogs.  My thoughts tend to run along the lines of: I’m providing statistical data for this person/company/entity to pore over and determine their SEO.  I tend to read my blogs through Feedly, so I don’t know how that plays into their statistics.  For the times that I want to see more, though, and I click through, I am more consciously thinking about how they would see that someone from the U.S. was referred by Feedly, etc.  And now when I click on links from Twitter, all of these thoughts go through my head.

• I appreciate the work of the bloggers I read.  I don’t think I thought it was easy to sit down and write blog posts, but I find that it takes me awhile.  I want to get the wording just right, and I never think I do.  I try to think through everything we learned in class about effective blog posts: title, headings, subheadings, lists, featured images, metadata, short paragraphs, supporting images, links, image attribution, etc.  For those of you out there who have been blogging for a long time, does it get faster?  Does it get easier?  Do these things start to become second nature where you no longer have to think it through every time you post?

In Conclusion

While this didn’t tell you anything about what happened to me today, I hope some prospective library school student out there is interested in how this class can affect something as simple as a “Day in the Life” post.

Who knows?  Maybe I will submit this as part of my project after all.