Twitter - it's for the birds!

I began by browsing Twitter using 'libraries' and 'librarians' as search terms . It seemed to me on the basis of the Tweets I looked at that the Tweets fell into four main categories: i) personal, which contained the search term but no information of significance outside of a defined friendship or work group, e.g. "Acquisition tasks are a lot trickier than I thought they would be . Oh, the challenge :)". Sorry, but to me that was pretty much a waste of time. ii) advertisements, which may well be useful but I thought there might be more efficient ways of communicating to potential users, e.g. "8 great #MooTools libraries for web designs" with a link to a company web page. iii) alerts to much longer articles on the web, which might be of use but perhaps there would be a more effective alert service such as an RSS feed. iv) (semi?)professional comments such as "I wonder if any libraries make donations to Wikipedia part of their collection budget .. going to suggest that where I work". But a Tweet like that seemed to me to belong more in a wiki or other profession-based network. More effective was "Forthcoming events @Boroondara Librarties for children and parents" plus a link to the library website.

I experimented with "diabetes" and "Central Asia travel" as optional topics. With respect to "diabetes" the first Tweet provided a website and "i think i died" - how useful a Tweet is that?? The second, "Pregnancy problems gestational diabetes", provided a link to a web site but wasn't much more than an ad for a brand of test strips. You'd do better with a subject search in a reputable medical database. The third was a reply to someone else's Tweet saying "My wife has type 1 diabetes" - on par with the first.

"Central Asia travel" produced four identical "I travel often far and near (list of continents/regions)" and one other Tweet ,"Tien-Shan Travel - your local expert in Central Asia - blog" and a link to a tour itinerary, which at least is useful (it looked a good tour actually ...) but you would get the same result with "Central Asia tours trek*" in a search engine.

By this stage I was ready to dismiss Twitter as a great potential time-waster for limited results but .... I looked at the Twitter entries of the Sunshine Coast Libraries and was much more impressed. That library uses Twitter as an alert service for patrons. It's most recent Tweet was "Last chance to purchase ticket for an evening with Judy Nunn tomorrow night" and there were also notices for other author talks, invitations to book launches and a link to the library's eNewsletter.

Tweeting takes up a lot of time and a library would need to consider very seriously why they are setting it up and what they want/can get out of it before making the investment. The Sunshine Coast Libraries have a clearly defined purpose and scope in Tweeting and that makes it work.