Like us on Facebook

There are hundreds of social media sites on the web, but with over 800 million users, Facebook is a logical place for libraries to meet their clientele. As Solomon stated, if you “… can choose only one place to have a social media presence, Facebook is almost certainly the best bet when it comes to demographics (Solomon, 2011, p.14). Facebook is more than a broadcast medium: acknowledging the “social” part of the media called Facebook, we can engage with patrons, be part of conversations by truly having a dialogue with our patrons and building relationships with them.

Although our library’s page had been created on May 24, 2011, we only had 39 users at the time I wrote my proposal to learn more about using Facebook in libraries (we have 47 today). We know we should be reaching more people but have not yet found the ticket to draw our potential followers to our page. In the article Facebookfor Libraries, one of the first things King suggests is setting up a username for your library page.  Solomon also suggests that libraries have a “vanity URL” (Solomon, 2011, p. 26). That had not been done, so I did so today. You can now find us at www.facebook.com/CamroseLibrary. I’ll wait if you’d like to head over there now and “like” us.

King also suggests that more than one person maintain the library’s Facebook page to ensure that conversations are monitored and answered. With five administrators, keeping our status updating at least once a day is much easier than if the responsibility belonged to one person alone. In the case of our library, those five administrators include both staff and board members which means different messages are being shared through our Facebook personality.

Connecting your library’s Facebook page to your library’s Flickr and YouTube pages are among Kings’ suggestions, too, but at this time our library does not have either a Flickr or a YouTube account. We do, however, actively tweet and our Facebook page is connected to our Twitter account as is suggested by Solomon (2011, p. 26). One spot updating makes my life easier, but I do have trouble remembering that what I’m posting to Facebook is also showing up on Twitter; keeping Facebook status updates to 140 characters is not as easy as one might think. Also, a Facebook status with a lot of “@someone” phrases that don’t follow you on Facebook but who do follow you on Twitter (or vice versa) seems strange to me. Apparently I can set up Facebook to only tweet some of my status updates; I plan to figure that one out. But not today.

Before I was director of library services at this library, I used to be the head librarian at this other library. There, our Facebook presence was much stronger with 216 friends and a very busy programming schedule promoted on heavily on Facebook.  Attendance at such events as Little Girls Night (which had 105 little girls in attendance) and the Royal Tea (with 85 people in attendance) significantly higher than those who actually responded on Facebook that they would be attending, leading me to believe that Facebook is a perfect medium to get people talking about events.  King’s article echoes that very same sentiment when he asked another librarian about her use of Facebook: she talks about the power of advocating and spreading the message. With 50% of Facebook users logging onto their accounts daily and connecting with an average of 130 Facebook acquaintances, that’s a lot of free communication!

How else do you know your posts are making an impact on people? Facebook has a little service called “post insights” that lets page administrators find out how many impressions each story makes and what percentage of those impressions result in an action (such as a “like”). Using this can give you a critical look at what information has been found to be interesting by your users and enable you to better customize your messages so they are shared more often thus reaching a larger audience.

Facebook also has a little tool called “view as”. This tool enables you to see how your followers see your page. This is certainly far more of a concern for your own personal page than for a public page. I assume that on a public page, such as our library’s page, I would want to leave privacy settings quite lax to make sure anyone who wants to contact us can.

I cannot ignore what is on our library’s shelves. With six books on Web 2.0, 16 books on social media, another 16 about Facebook, it is apparent that social media and Facebook are on the minds of even rural libraries.

King finishes his article with this insightful message:

Give your Facebook community the content they want, and they will become your fans. Even more importantly, they’ll start interacting. My guess? Get that interaction going, and your customers—the ones wanting to interact with you in Facebook Pages—will become advocates for you and your library—not only online, but in person, too (King, 2011).

Read what I read:

Facebook (n.d.). In Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

King, D.L. (2011, May 27). Facebook for libraries. American Libraries. Retrieved from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272011/facebook-libraries

Solomon, L, (2011). Doing social media so it matters. Chicago: American Library Association.