Facebook for Libraries
It’s easy to use social media’s most popular tool to connect with your community
Posted Fri, 05/27/2011 - 07:01
Printer-friendly versionToday, 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
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
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
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.
DAVID LEE KING is digital branch and services manager for the Topeka and Shawnee County (Kans.) Public Library.
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Comments
Was it really necessary to
Was it really necessary to devote an entire feature to Facebook in the May/June issue of American Libraries? Facebook is now seven years old, has over a half-billion users worldwide, and has an Academy Award-winning movie based on its creation. Is there a librarian working today who has not at least heard of Facebook?
Is that the best use of
Is that the best use of tax dollars?
In response to tax dollars...
I don’t know if your question was in earnest or you ask because you do not feel that taking time out for a Facebook page is important. I assume you read this article because of some kind of affiliation with libraries. The point of the library is to serve its community. I believe the point of this article is to raise awareness among librarians that social networking sites like Facebook are perfect tools to stay connected with the community they serve. To go further than the person who answered yes, it is a great use of funds because it is a popular mode of communication with a large portion of the community connected. The library is doing it’s job by serving the community.
Yes.
Yes.
YouTube: Create a Facebook Page for Your Library
I made a short video showing the basics of creating a page that you describe here, David - http://youtu.be/tQ9CcIGNuFM
It was for our Nebraska Learns 2.0 online learning program - our Thing for May was A Facebook Page for Your Library - http://nelearns.blogspot.com/2011/05/thing-48-facebook-pages.html
Even tho May is done, I’m going to share this article on our Facebook page. I just wish you had written it a month earlier! :)
photo/video use policy
What privacy-protection policies do you use for images and videos your library posts on Facebook? Especially, underage minors attending library events.
No longer use Facebook
Once upon a time I had a Facebook account and it became annoyingly invasive, often sending “Friend invites” from people who did not send me the personalized invitations Facebook forwarded to me. I checked. I asked by e-mail or in person whether an acquaintance had invited me to Facebook (the e-mail was from them afterall) and was told “no” the individual had not invited me to Friend them. Disgusted with Facebook’s lack of ethics I decided to delete my account. Upon doing so I found it a web of layered personalized information that I was forced to delete section by section — pre-populated fields that I had never completed in the first place. It took a long time to finally purge everything, but I did … I think. Who knows what information is still lurking in Facebook with my name attached? Anyway, thank goodness Facebook be gone!
Using a personnal account to create a page
I have been told that it is a bad idea to create a Facebook page using a personnal account. For exemple if you enter a credit card number for publicity and than your administrator is no longer an employee (who created the page initialy from his/her personnal account), you will need the personnal password of the employee who created the page, even if that employee is no longer listed as an administrator. So, the advise would be to create the page first and than adding administrators. You will need a personnal account anyway if you want to “like” pages as your library (which does not make sense I know).
answer to your comment
This is no longer true for Facebook Pages. This is how it works now:
- Someone creates a Facebook Page for the library using their personal profile
- They assign other administrators – any administrator can do this
- Then, if the first person no longer works at the library, someone can simply remove that person as an administrator – no problems.
- I’d suggest using an organizational credit card for buying Facebook Ads, instead of a personal credit card
- The library’s Facebook Page can now Like other other pages – this is a recent change.
Hope this helps!
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