Mar 04 2010
Facebook is great for me. . .but when is it great for a library?
It was 2007 when I joined Facebook. I had to join. All of my friends were on it and they couldn’t believe that I wasn’t. It was the new medium to keep me in “the loop”. Soon after, all of us finished our undergraduate degrees and moved away from each other making Facebook our #1 means to remain connected. As our lives grew busy, we still managed to keep in touch with sporadic wall posts, status updates, organizing occasional get-togethers in the “events” section, and by posting pictures. With Facebook, staying connected couldn’t have been easier.
So why should a library create a Facebook account? If it isn’t serving a clear purpose, I don’t think that librarians should be wasting their time. Meredith Farkas’s expands this point in her blog post Libraries in Social Networking Software. She says, “I think there is a big difference between “being where our patrons are” and “being USEFUL to our patrons where they are”” (Farkas). I agree with Farkas. If a library does not have a direction on facebook, they will inevitably lose their initial users.
So, if a library does decide that they want to create a Facebook account, the first step they should take is to determine what information they will include on their Facebook page. To do this, they should heavily focus on deciding who their user community is. What are their needs? What are their interests? Every library community is different so librarians need to determine unique qualities they can include on their Facebook page in order to draw their community members in and keep them there.
After the librarians have determined the needs and interests of their community, it is time to decide what the overall purpose of their Facebook page will be. Is it informative? Promotional? A means of communicating and building an online community between patrons and librarians? For fun? Or perhaps a mixture of everything. Whatever the library decides, knowing what the library Facebook’s purpose is is essential.
Once librarians have determined their account’s overall purpose and their Facebook account is up and running there are a few services that librarians can add. The first is their profile information. Here, they can include their address, phone number, email, possibly their website, and any other information related to their library. Photos of the library building, the library staff, and a map indicating their location may also give a feeling of familiarity and closeness to library users. There were a couple other features on the Facebook page for Hennepin County Library that I thought were excellent: the “Find Books & More” as well as “Ask Us”. The “Find Books & More” was a search engine for their library catalogue. This feature is incredibly convenient because Facebook users can enter the library catalogue without having to visit the library website. The “Ask Us” is very similar in convenience. I think that this is excellent in that if library users have any queries about the topics provided on the library’s Facebook page, they do not have to delay their questions.
Finally, a library’s Facebook page needs to be monitored frequently. I believe that one of the best methods for creating an online community between librarians and their users is for librarians to offer responses to comments and queries quickly. The promptness in their replies should demonstrate to the users that they matter. Additionally, if the response time is quick, there is a possibility that the library user may ask another question, creating a conversation online. These interactions as well as the details I discussed above could result in an exceptionally dynamic Facebook page.