Exercise 5

Write a post on your blog about why you think it is a good idea for a library to participate on a social networking site, or why not. Make certain you label your post.

An involvement in social networking sites allows libraries to reach out to a broader social specrum and especially engage younger people to visit the library and kindle their enthusiasm for reading. Statistically, youth make up a large percentage of social network users, making it an ideal platform to engage them. Furthermore, a social networking profile allows libraries to quickly communicate information about upcoming events, for example a facebook post about a new book club starting up, or certain library resources being out of order due to maintenance work. In conjunction with other community profiles and council pages, social networking allows one to promote the other. An active presence on social networking sites also communicates that the library is ‘up-to-date’ and representative of other online resources it may possess, such as access to journals.