Social Media means free marketing.

One of the greatest things about Social Media is that its free to use. This is great news for libraries, especially in cash strapped days like these. Social Media is great for marketing, which is often badly funded in libraryland and sometimes poorly executed. With social media tools like Facebook, it is rather easy to produce a professional looking marketing campaign to communicate directly with the end user.
Social media is ultimately about making connections with and between patrons and creating a sense of community. Many librarians buy into the idea of the library functioning as a community center so it makes sense to engage in social media that promotes this aim.
Unfortunatley many libraries use social media to simply broadcast infomation, treating it as a one way medium and failing to capitalize on the power of the medium. A library should have a goal in mind when using social media, not just use it because everyone else is. Libraries that do not have clear goals about why they are using social media will most likely have few followers which may in fact hurt the library's image rather than improve it.There is nothing worse than looking at a really dull profile page that shows no imagination or creativity.