I have always been a bit wary of Facebook, largely due to concerns over privacy settings, and articles such as
"What Facebook fails to recognise" and
"Facebook: the virtual Hotel California" which highlight its darker aspects, have hardly reassured me. Therefore, I've never really been tempted to create a personal account. However, as I have mentioned in previous posts,
King's Library does now have a presence on Facebook, thanks to an account created and maintained by my colleague Gareth. I chip in now and again with a few suggestions of things to post. We try to keep the tone quite light-hearted, including quirky things such as a newspaper clipping from 1884 which reports on a seal being allowed to swim in King's fountain (my excuse for including the cute animal picture below), and the
New spice, study like a scholar parody from YouTube.
We also use it for announcements, such as book return reminders, and as an arena for promoting things like our
Amazon store and our subscription to the useful
Library of America series. We have had positive comments and "likes" for many of our posts, so it seems to have been fairly well received so far, and, since 235 people "Like" us, we don't feel we are broadcasting into a void. However, we do find ourselves scrabbling round for ideas sometimes, so the
25 great Facebook page content ideas may well come in handy. I'd like our page to have some fixed links in the left hand menu - to things like our Library catalogue and our Delicious bookmarks, but we haven't worked out how to add those yet! Something like
De Montfort University Library's page has would be good.
I agree it's good for a library's presence on social media sites to be fairly lighthearted. After all, we're following students into spaces where they relax, they don't want to be overloaded with serious library business!
ReplyDelete(I love that Study like a Scholar video!)