We hit a milestone today: we acquired our 2,000th follower on the Metro Transportation Library & Archive Twitter account.
Earlier today, Thousand Oaks Transit followed us on Twitter, pushing us past the 2,000 mark for the first time.
Launched just a few years ago, our Twitter feed has become a central part of our efforts to reach out to and engage the community about the past, present and future of transit and transportation in the Los Angeles Region.
Our tweets have mostly been an effort to regularly highlight the most high-interest stories published in our daily Transportation Headlines.
We quickly became a leader in disseminating news for not only the transportation community, but amongst those sharing information about related subjects such as infrastructure, sustainability, local politics, urban planning, as well as libraries, archives and social media.
Until recently, our Library of only two staffmembers had more followers on Twitter than the entire 73-branch Los Angeles Public Library and the 86-branch County of Los Angeles Public Library systems combined.
We have sorted the Twitter accounts we are following into lists which others can use to build their communities of followers and those they wish to follow as well.
These subject-oriented lists provided the basis for the Metro Library Twitter Daily, a digest of daily tweets in newspaper format we launched a few months ago which provides a quick, easy-to-read overview of the national transportation conversation in newspaper format.
Each day, tweets from selected Twitter accounts regenerate the daily digest, providing users a useful scan of whats happening in transit and transportation divided into major categories — one that is easier to follow than a streaming chronology of tweets from various subject areas.
Best of all, you don’t need to be on Twitter or even have a Twitter account to use this information-sharing tool.
More information about it can be found here.
We have no idea whether Twitter is here to stay, but social media tools facilitating interconnectivity surely are — and we will continue to explore, test, and deploy those which help us get information in the hands of our users.