Facebook for Libraries
By David Lee King
It’s easy to use social media’s most popular tool to connect with your
community
Today, I spent part of the day connecting with people. I complained about a
silly election video, chatted with a college friend about a band, and put
some finishing touches on plans for a conference taking place at the
library.
I did all this through Facebook. These days, it seems like everyone has a
Facebook account. Quite a few of my professional colleagues and most of my
family have Facebook accounts. Nationally, I’m a bit ahead of the curve:
Approximately 41% of the U.S. population has a personal Facebook profile,
according to a 2010 study from Edison Research (PDF file). According to
Wikipedia, 50% of those Facebook users actually log into their Facebook
accounts every day. Total Facebook population? Globally, over 600 million
of us currently use Facebook, MSNBC reported in January, and most of them
interact every day with an average of 130 Facebook friends and
acquaintances.
Think about that for a second. What library wouldn’t love to have a direct,
free line to potentially 41% of your community’s ear? Keep in mind, these
people could be connected to another 130 people in your community. That’s a
lot of free communication!
So, stake a claim in this digital land and create a Facebook Page for your
library. Here’s how to set up a Facebook account, and how to use it to
connect with your community.
Setting it up
First things first: If you are one of the 59% of Americans who have not yet
opened a personal Facebook account, I recommend that you create a personal
Facebook profile for yourself before setting up an organizational Facebook
Page for your library. Think of it as your entrance ticket to all things
Facebook.
That Facebook profile can be real or fake (although, if you set up a fake
profile, and Facebook discovers it, your account will be deleted). It’s
best to set up a real, live, personal account of your very own; you’ll find
it useful for other things than just setting up a Facebook Page for your
library.
Once you’ve created a Facebook profile for yourself, you can start working
on an organizational Facebook Page. This part is easy—simply go to
www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the “Create Page” button. Voìla! You have
a new Facebook Page.
Actually, it’s not quite that easy. There is some information you have to
add first. You have to provide the name of your organization and pick an
organization “type.” Facebook doesn’t provide many choices here. Your best
bets are “government” or “nonprofit” which are both located in the
“company, organization, or institution” pull-down menu. Make sure to check
the box marked “I’m the official representative of this person, business,
band, or product and have permission to create this Page.”
After you have gathered 25 fans, you can create a unique username and
shortened URL for your library’s Facebook Page. Most likely, you’ll want to
shorten your library’s name. For example, my library’s official name is
Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. We frequently shorten that online
to TopekaLibrary. So, our Facebook Page URL is
www.facebook.com/topekalibrary—short and simple.
After you’ve filled out all the introductory information, like your
address, phone number, hours, etc., then stop. Before you do much more to
your fledgling Facebook Page, you need to figure out a couple of things:
Who will do the work of the Page, like posting updates?
Who will answer questions?
Will you use the Events section of the account? If so, who will post
events?
How often will you post updates? Who keeps track of user names and
passwords?
Figure out those practical details, and also create some one-year goals for
your Facebook presence. Goals can include how many status updates you plan
to post per day/week or how many fans you want. You can also discuss more
difficult issues, like what types of content you will post and which
specific audience will be your focus.
Next steps
Once your library’s Facebook Page is created, you can start thinking about
how you might customize the library’s Facebook presence for your customers.
First, gather your Facebook team. It’s a good idea to have more than one
person manage your Facebook Page. Why? The goal with a Facebook Page is to
start and continue conversations about your staff and your stuff—and
conversations require responses. Monitoring conversations and creating
responses when needed is best handled by more than one person, so you can
adequately cover the day’s interactions. On another level, it allows you to
spread out the work … and the fun.
Once your Facebook team is established, they can look at those one-year
goals and figure out the best way to meet them. Maybe you decided you want
pictures and videos of library events on the Page. Great! There’s an easy
way to connect your library’s Flickr and YouTube accounts to your Facebook
Page via status updates. That way, when you post a new video in YouTube, a
link also appears on your Facebook wall and gets sent to all your Facebook
followers.
This can be done with pretty much any type of content that has an RSS feed:
your library’s blog, Twitter account, etc. The hard part isn’t setting up
automatic posting updates; it’s figuring out what to share and what not to
share.
For example, ask yourself questions such as: “Do I want to send all my
library’s tweets to Facebook, or just some of them?” Both are easy to do—it
really depends on who your Facebook users are.
Same thing with events. If your library doesn’t already have an events
calendar, Facebook Events can fill that need. If you already have a way to
share events on your website, you might decide to pick and choose, and only
post some to Facebook Events.
Here is the great thing about sharing content like blog posts, videos, or
upcoming events via Facebook: Your Facebook followers can share that
content, which will let all their Facebook friends see that update and read
about it if they’re interested.
I asked some of my Twitter followers what works on their library’s Facebook
Page. Jamie Hollier of the Colorado State Library says that during her
directorship of the Delta County (Colo.) Libraries, “Using Facebook to post
events brought new users to events by making our users the advocates.” It
works like this: Let’s say you post an upcoming event in Facebook as a
status update. Five of your “fans” share the event. If they each have 130
Facebook friends, that information was just, in essence, forwarded to 650
more Facebook users—most of whom are likely to live in or near your
community. When your library’s Facebook followers share the library's
content, they are acting as a type of advocate for the library by helping
spread its message.
You can also focus on specific audiences. Facebook Pages have Facebook
Insights—daily, weekly, and monthly statistics that provide a snapshot of
your Facebook audience. This information can be used to find out just who
your audience is. For example, at my library’s Facebook Page, 71% of
visitors are female (over 40% are ages 25–44). That tells me that we can
focus on adult females and customize our content for that user group.
(Maybe we already are!)
By using the power of Facebook, your library just increased its reach … for
free. Not bad!
Connecting with people
In Facebook, conversation is a huge draw—it’s a primary activity of most
Facebook users. Rochelle Hartman, information services coordinator at La
Crosse (Wis.) Public Library, agrees. At LCPL, staff members “post things
designed to invite conversation. It’s been a lot more successful than [our]
website,” Hartman tweeted.
The status update box is your main point of connection to your local
Facebook crowd. Keeping your library’s status updated is real work, and it
takes time to do right. Toby Greenwalt of Skokie (Ill.) Public Library says
“daily engagement—keeping up a steady flow of content and conversation—is
key.” To keep up that steady flow of content, you have to devote staff to
adding content to your Facebook Page.
You also need to work on being personable online. Make sure your status
updates read like something you’d say out loud. Sometimes, it helps to
actually say your status updates aloud. If it’s not phrased like something
you would say in conversation, edit away. The more conversational you
sound, the more opportunities for conversation you’ll have.
Once you have figured out how to approach conversation, start asking
questions. Nicole Pagowsky of the Dallas County (Tex.) Community College
District’s El Centro Library agrees. Colleagues in her workplace find that
“asking questions [is] more successful than just making announcements,” she
says.
Be witty. Share really interesting stuff about your library and the
information found there. For example, at TopekaLibrary, asking about books
really encourages comments. People love sharing their favorite authors, or
which books they’d want if they were shipwrecked on a desert island (the
Bible and a book on building a sailboat from scratch were popular choices).
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.
FONTE: DAVID LEE KING is digital branch and services manager for the Topeka
and Shawnee County (Kans.) Public Library.
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272011/facebook-libraries
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