It could be exciting and very beneficial for Whangarei Libraries to be on Facebook. It could be a useful way of getting Whangarei Libraries in people's faces (excuse the pun ;-)) and of marketing the library.
The way to do it would be by regularly using the "what's on your mind" feature. Many of my friends use this feature every day - sometimes several times a day e.g. "I'm so pleased it's Friday". This then displays on my wall. It is possible for friends to make comments and get a sort of a brief dialogue going. The effect of this is that, whenever I log onto facebook, I can check out my wall and - at a glance - see what my friends have been up to in the last day or so.
Imagine if Whangarei Libraries did this. When we had a busy day we might say: "Whew! 1000 customers today" or after a funtime we might say "Just had 50 kids smiling at funtime!". The effect of these short messages would communicate to our friends that the library is a busy, happening place and also keep them informed about the different services we offer.
More importantly I think, Facebook could be used in this way to promote upcoming events. Short messages like: "getting ready the school holiday programme which starts Monday 13th" could be put up every day.
While I think having a Facebook presence is a good idea I do see a number of issues around setting it up and keeping it going.
- How to attract friends in the first place? This is a key problem I think. Would people want to be friends with a library? I'm not sure. How would we get friends? We could advertise the library's Facebook in the library, on a bookmark etc and get people to seek us or we could actively seek out friends in our area. Are we prepared to push ourselves out there like that?
- Are Facebook users likely to be the library users we are trying to market to and vice versa?
- Who would be responsible for maintaining our Facebook?
- Is it a duplication of resources to do Facebook and maintain a website?
Despite these issues (and probably many more) I think Facebook is worth a go for our library.
I see the end vision being: Whangarei Libraries on Facebook with lots of friends getting regular updates about what we are doing ... and us getting lots of feedback from our friends about the good (and hopefully not bad) expereinces they have here
Whoa. That was a really thorough analysis of how the WDC could use Facebook. How hard would it be to set up do you think?
ReplyDeleteIn one sense I don't think it would be hard to set up - setting up facebook pages is easy.
ReplyDeleteIn another sense I think it will take some thought and planning ... and it would probably be a good idea to do some research and see what/if other libraries are already using facebook. We could then steal their good ideas. It would require Management approval of course beacuse it will involve staff time and we'd need to commit to doing it.
But really, if we wanted to do it it can't be that hard can it?