Social Media Comparison

I have used Facebook since I was a freshman in high school and the social network was just getting started, and I've watched it continue to change, year after year. I've noticed how Facebook constantly reshapes itself to match the trends of other social networks, and how it is almost completely unrecognizable from the website it started out as. It's an interesting course for a social media platform to take, since Facebook's attempt to do everything (messaging, photos, newsfeed, personal profile, news, etc.) contrasts other popular social networks that focus on one specific thing, such as Instagram with pictures and filters, or Snapchat with ephemeral videos. Snapchat is the only other social network I've used in my personal life, and I use it in a radically different way from Facebook. While I mostly just use Facebook to scroll stupidly through repostings from other people and don't post anything for myself, I never open Snapchat just to browse through other people's postings; I only use it to view and respond to messages sent directly to me. I think it's a bit strange that Snapchat has become the preferred means of communication (over texting, even!) for so many people, because it's a much more cumbersome process than texting or messaging over other social media platforms.

I think the most important factor in my choice of which social media platforms to use is the social media usage of my close friends. My choice to use Facebook was originally fueled by my desire to keep up with friends outside of school, before I had a cell phone. Since then, Facebook has continued to be the most convenient means of connecting with friends because everyone already uses it. I just started using Snapchat in the past six months or so because that's when I finally got a smart phone and I discovered most of my friends use it for messaging.

In my work, I'm the social media manager for my small liberal arts college's library, and we use Facebook and Instagram as our platforms. It's been a great learning experience, and I've found that Facebook is a great way to connect with faculty and staff, but Instagram is much better at engaging current students. It's been encouraging for me to find that my most original postings, the ones that take the most time and effort to create, tend to do the best on both Facebook and Instagram. I tend to think of Facebook as a place where originality goes to die--a land of endless repostings and Buzzfeed videos. Most of all, I've found that just using humor in social media postings is the best way to connect with students and library patrons, because we aren't used to seeing much personality in the posts from institutions, so a bit of humor goes a long way.

I've found that posting for the library has been a good way to spread the word about library displays and library or campus events. I've posted a few time lapse videos of setting up new displays or sections in the library, and they have been the most successful posts of all! I think it's slightly increased the usage of those sections of the library, and has certainly increased awareness of all the resources our library offers. 

I've appreciated IUPUI's Facebook page, because being an online student means that it's hard for me to form a real connection with the school as a physical place instead of yet another series of web pages. IUPUI's Facebook videos that show tours of campus and flyovers are particularly helpful for me to get to know and take a bit of ownership of my school.