This post follows on from an earlier post about the use of Facebook Pages for Libraries. There have been a number of further developments since then both internally and externally.

Internally, our Facebook page has gradually increased interest in terms of the number of fans it has. We currently have over 200 fans – not a massive amount but not bad without any formal marketing yet. I’ve had verbal feedback from some students who feel it is a good way to be kept up-to-date with Learning Centre services and resources as they use Facebook regularly. I’ll be writing a progress report shortly to take to a review meeting in January. The page hasn’t changed much since I first set it up, but there are many developments which we could possibly include in the future (e.g. Using proxy server for database search applications, a catalogue search, use of Talis applications which are currently being developed). I now have a small marketing budget too so I need to think about the best way to promote the page.

Externally, there has been a growing interest in the use of Facebook Pages for libraries. Over the past year, I’ve had enquiries from various different external staff (mainly from UK academic libraries) asking for information about our project and help and advice with producing their own page. My advice is always to give it a go if you can, it only takes a minimal amount of time and can be used for promotion or to improve awareness of your services and resources. Common concerns seem to be based on privacy issues and the worry that students will see the library presence as an invasion of their space. From my personal point of view, I don’t see it as an invasion of privacy as students themselves choose to view the page and even if they decide to join as a fan they can still have a private profile. Jane Secker recently presented Whose space is it anyway? at a Facebook conference at Liverpool John Moores University about how libraries are using Facebook, and used our page as one of her case studies. Following on from that, I have been asked to write a paper for ALISS Quarterly on our use of Facebook which I’m currently in the process of writing.

It certainly seems that the use of Facebook in libraries is becoming more mainstream, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to be involved in the early developments.

How about you – is Facebook working for you? Does your library has a Facebook Page or are you maybe thinking of developing one? Do you know of any particularly good applications for libraries to use? Please share in the comments. For those interested in what others are doing with Facebook I recommend reading the comments on David Lee King’s post What can you do with a Facebook page?.

Tweet this

Firstly, a brief apology for the extended time period since the last post, I’ve been mega busy with work, study and preparing for Christmas (as well as spending a week in Scotland which was more of the relaxing than busy variety!). If you’re interested, I’ll be adding photos of our Scotland visit and a trip to London yesterday to my Flickr and Facebook accounts shortly.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post. Since I first started investigating how we could utilise Facebook for our library users it’s had it’s fair share of issues and hoops to jump through, but it looks likely that we’ll be able to start using it soon. Our University Marketing department now have a corporate account on Facebook and they’ll hopefully be able to set a page up for our department to use as part of their account.

I’ve also been trying to establish exactly what we should use it for. My view is that it should be used as a marketing tool. I know that many of our students use Facebook on a regular basis, and I’m hoping we can promote our Facebook page to them so that they will join as fans. This way we can send them news updates (e.g. Christmas opening hours) and notify them of any events they may be interested in (e.g. our information skills workshops). I hope we can add links to useful sections of the library web pages which we all know are not used effectively at the moment by students (usually because they’re not aware of the material on there), and maybe even add a catalogue search box integrated in Facebook.

There are a few UK academic libraries appearing on Facebook Pages so I’m hoping we’ll be able to share advice and experiences, there is a group within Facebook called Libraries using Facebook Pages which I’ve found very useful to see what others are up to.

Is anyone else out there using Facebook Pages (for libraries or other organisations)?

Tweet this

Facebook have finally created a section for organisations to create a page – woohoo!

Groups have been possible on Facebook for quite a while, but from my experience these are not well used. You have to actively visit the page to see any updates, and in today’s age of RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions this means that people very easily forget about them – I know I do!

Facebook Pages now allow organisations to create a page on Facebook and customise it (pretty much like an individual profile but you can have numerous administrators). People can then add themselves as “Fans” and you can send updates to all your fans at once.

I’ve expressed an interest in creating a page for our library department here but it now has to go through all the formalities of a project proposal, a sponsor, etc, etc. so it could take a while. It’s a shame really as I wanted to just have a go and see how it panned out, but I thought it best to check with people higher just in case.

I still think it is another excellent way to keep students up to date though and could be a great way to publicise events such as our workshops which anyone can turn up to. Just a quick wander through our IT Suite tells you that Facebook is very heavily used by a lot of our students, and I think we really need to be going to our users wherever they are, rather than waiting for them to come to us.

I’m hoping to take the project forward as I really think it could be a good way to reach students, I just hope we can pass it through the formalities fairly quickly as the actual page construction will only take a few minutes!

Has anyone else developed a new Facebook Page for their organisation?

Tweet this