Facebook & Libraries

I find the explosion of social media into everyday life totally fascinating - and it's clear that individuals and organisations have a long way to go before we all get the hang of how to use this technology to its best advantage. I guess it's likely that by the time we've got it all figured out, the IT world will have long since moved on to something new and even more confusing!

Think for a moment how far we've come in such a short space of time.

If I summarise some information from this Web Designer Depot page, we get a timeline that looks something like this:

• 2002: Friendster launched
• 2003: Hi5 launched; LinkedIn launched; MySpace launched
• 2004: Facebook launched (initially to Harvard only, then expanded to include other schools/colleges)
• YouTube launched
• 2006: MySpace the biggest social network worldwide; Facebook opened up to everyone; Twitter launched
• 2007: iPhone launched
• 2008: Facebook the biggest social network worldwide

That's a lot of progress and change in the space of a decade - and when you look at the rise and fall of resources like MySpace and Friends Reunited, it becomes clear that nobody - not Facebook, not Twitter - can bank on maintaining their current market dominance without a lot of effort and development.

Now it didn't take too long for companies to get in on the social media act (well, not in comparison to the time it took them to wake up to the web in the first place) - and eventually even libraries got involved. And here's the big question: Why?

Off the top of my head, I can think of three reasons why a library would get on social media:

1. To make sure you "own" your own social media presence, rather than have someone else set it up for you (could be a member of staff... could even be a student)
2. To provide a means of contact for your users
3. To open up a new way of interacting with your users

1 Own Your Own Presence

Extremely important these days. The last thing you need is for an unofficial account to be created, and for people to think it's your official voice. You don't need to do much with your account - the mere fact that it's there is sufficient, with perhaps the odd post or two.

2. Provide a Means of Contact

If you wanted the bare minimum of social media presence, go for this option. You need only do the minimum input to your account - the main thing is to have it there so someone can contact you via Facebook or Twitter if they like.

3. Open a New Way of Interacting With Users

This is the option to go for if you're going to commit to getting properly involved. This option requires full engagement with your users, and with the social media platform. You need to be active, responsive, interesting - and most important you need to engage with your audience. It's simply not good enough to just post a few news stories in a one-way information exchange.

Where Do We Stand?

On Twitter, we've got 1 & 2 ticked - but that's absolutely as far as it goes. On Facebook, 1 & 2 are definitely ticked, and if I was being generous, I might give us half a tick for 3 (but that's being generous).

If we are happy to only achieve points 1 & 2, then job done - we can pat ourselves on the back and get on with other things. A bit like the old portable TV in the kitchen, our social media presence can sit in the corner gathering dust. It works after a fashion, but it's not our main TV, and when that really great programme comes on, we're not all going to head off to the kitchen and sit round the portable when we could be on the sofa in front of the 42" plasma.

But what if we did want to go for Point 3? Well, that would require a lot of work - and it would require us to fully embrace the change in approach that social media dictates. In brief:

• Post often
• Post about what we want our users to know
• But also post things that our users want to know
• Post about what's happening in the library - not just formal events, but day-to-day life
• Post about the public goings-on
• And also about what's happening behind the scenes - the stuff we're doing that our users wouldn't normally know about

And most important of all:

• Be human
• Don't be a bland, boring organisation
• Demonstrate that the library is run by ordinary people, for the benefit of all our users - develop a personality - if we're having a cake sale in the staff room to raise money for a charity, get that on Facebook

People want to engage with other, real people - not faceless organisations. If you want an organisational social media presence to generate worthwhile interactions with people, then it needs to be more like a real person, not a corporate nonentity.