I have one social media account: Facebook.  I reluctantly made this account five years ago after moving across the country, as a way to stay in touch with folks back home.  Since then, I have posted a grand total of three status updates and 16 photographs.  I login once a week or so, sometimes more if I’m looking for a source of procrastination.  Because of this, I often find myself afflicted with what I call “Facebook guilt” :  I didn’t like enough photographs.  I missed my former classmate’s birthday.  I failed to comment on a friend’s update about a new job within three hours of them posting.

The guilt usually passes pretty quickly though.  I find out about the things that matter most in other ways.  I’m by no means against social media; it just isn’t my thing.  I do think it can be overused, but I also think it can have value.  And I’ve finally admitted to myself that it is not going away and that, if for nothing else than professional reasons, I should probably become more versed in how to use it, which is why I am taking this class.

I do have a small amount of experience managing the Facebook account of an organization, the nonprofit where I worked for many years prior to coming to SLAIS.  Like many other organizations, we realized that we needed to jump on the social media bandwagon and so started a Facebook page, without much of a strategy in place beyond post regularly and get as many followers as possible.  And this is what I did.  Even at the time, I knew we could be using social media more to our advantage, but did know how.  Like many other organizations, especially smaller nonprofits, we simply did not have the staff time to devote to developing a social media strategy that fully integrated with our overall communications.

As for the world of social media beyond Facebook, I have never been anything more than an occasional spectator.  I read a few blogs related to archives, libraries, and other areas of personal interest to me.  I’ve never taken the time to use any sort of feed aggregation tool, mostly because I feel like if I did do that, I would end up with too may feeds and just end up scrolling through entirely too many titles.