Facebooking It: Promoting Library Services to Young Adults through Social Media

With social media a normal part of the daily lives of young adults, librarians are using these sites to promote library services. This paper investigates the perceptions and attitudes of librarians towards social media as a tool for libraries; and explores the way librarians utilize social media to portray professional roles and responsibilities to young patrons. This author focuses on the pastoral role of librarians and discusses possibilities for performing this role through social media. Although presently under-researched, social media provides librarians with one more avenue to advocate for, engage with and support young adults. RUNNING HEAD: FACEBOOKING IT 4 Introduction With social media a normal part of the everyday lives of young adults, libraries have begun to use online tools to promote library services to this age group. According to a study released by the Pew Research Center (2013), 67% of young adults visit social networking sites daily with an additional 21% visiting weekly. These sites provide librarians with an avenue to engage with young adult patrons regularly and in ways have not been possible before. With a multitude of social networking sites already in existence, it is essential that librarians, particularly those serving young adults, understand how to use these sites to reach young adults. A quote from a recent report produced by Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) illustrates this need distinctly, “Clearly, if all libraries serving teens want to more effectively serve today’s ‘connected’ teens and demonstrate value to the community, they must ramp up engagement in areas beyond academic or formal learning” (Braun, Hartman, Hughes-Hassell, Kumasi, and Yoke 2014 6). Social media provide librarians with one possibility to engage with young adults in a way that is not rigidly focused on education. Social networking sites are defined as online services that permits individuals to create a public or semi-public profile within an enclosed system, identify a list of other users with whom they would like to connect, and view and navigate this list of users and lists created by other users within the system (boyd and Ellison 2007). The formats of social networking sites vary; from the imagefocused micro-blogging site Tumblr to the largely text-based micro-blogging tool Twitter. Typically, users of these sites are not socializing with strangers but with RUNNING HEAD: FACEBOOKING IT 5 “real life” friends, family members, classmates, and colleagues (boyd and Ellison 2007). Libraries and librarians exist within the daily lives of young adult patrons. Yet, library and information studies (LIS) literature offers little regarding how social media can be used to promote the roles libraries and librarians play in the lives of young adults. The sheer number of these sites, along with frequently changing interfaces and features, often leaves librarians confused and reluctant to incorporate social media into their existing collection of marketing tools (Carlsson 2012). However, social media provides librarians, and young adult librarians in particular, with an inexpensive and innovative avenue to advocate for libraries, engage with young adults, and present less obvious services librarians to young adults (e.g. library as a safe space, social/emotional/psychological support, mentoring). For the purposes of this study, young adults are defined as youth between the ages of 12 and 18. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study investigating how librarians use social media to engage with young adult patrons and what roles librarians perceive social media as providing for promoting library services. One role focused on in particular is pastoral care. While the term “pastoral care” may be new to LIS, this describes a role that librarians have long filled (Cesari 2014; Jones 2008; Miller and Wallis 2011). In the context of libraries, pastoral care describes the social, emotional, and psychological support librarians provide patrons, primarily children and young adults.