Photo by Wouter de BruijnI cheated on this one, having been fortunate enough to attend the May session of Twitter for libraries, run by Sarah Stamford and Emma Coonan. Thank you both!
It was interesting to learn that the University Library's Twitter feed is followed largely by other libraries and library staff, rather than by students. I had assumed that Twitter would be useful mainly for user education, but this is apparently not the case.
It would be awfully easy to spend a lot of time browsing Twitter, so I am keen to use it selectively and limit the time I devote to it.
Have other Cambridge academic libraries found that their Twitter feeds have been useful for user education?
It was interesting to learn that the University Library's Twitter feed is followed largely by other libraries and library staff, rather than by students. I had assumed that Twitter would be useful mainly for user education, but this is apparently not the case.
It would be awfully easy to spend a lot of time browsing Twitter, so I am keen to use it selectively and limit the time I devote to it.
Have other Cambridge academic libraries found that their Twitter feeds have been useful for user education?
Your point about the UL tweets being followed mostly by library staff rather than by students or academics is not just very valid but of prime marketing importance! Twitter just ain't doing it for them, we ain't cool and the demand hasn't caught up with the technology [though hopefully by the time it has, Twitter will be cheeping pathetically in the waste bin and something better will have come along
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that's down to the type of tweets used? It would be interesting to see if that pattern is the same for other library accounts that take a different approach. For example Isla's posts from the Medical Library include NHS evidence updates and links to relevant articles.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the anonymity is a factor as well (as someone somewhere else suggested... can't remember who, sorry! Possibly the LbrGoddess herself?) People like to know who they're talking to. Piece of research there to be done if someone's looking for ideas?
I'm coming across as a major Twitter advocate I know - I actually prefer RSS feeds for current awareness and Twitter for networking and following conferences and events live (if I'm around at the right time, which I tend to be since I'm just working part-time!)
There's been quite a bit of discussion (cf.
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/aIgAEg , http://bit.ly/aUrKEI & http://bit.ly/cU6rLW ) on the age profile of Twitter users. A tentative conclusion, at one point, anyway, was that Twitter was attracting older users than sites such as Facebook.
Certainly the people I tend to meet via Twitter are library professionals rather than students. I wd be the last person to follow a trend merely because it was trendy. I cannot say if the evidence for Twitter's relative lack of interest to teenagers says anything about its being more than merely trendy.