Using Facebook to Maximize Your Library's Potential

1. Thumbs Up!
Using Facebook to Maximize Your Library’s Potential

2. A quick tour of the MCL Facebook page
Information: Your Info tab should be content-rich. Flesh out the “Basic” and “Detailed” info to
include contact info, locations, hours and user-policy statement.

3. Tour (cont.)
Photos: Use photos whenever you can—people love photos! Create various photo albums for
different events. For example, we’ve created albums for Summer Reading, Branch Openings,
Central Library Eco-Roof, special events and folks with the GIANT library card, just to name a
few.

4. Tour (cont.)
The Wall: This is where all the action happens! Be creative. At various times, content can be
playful, serious, unusual, humorous or unexpected. At the very least it should be informative--at
its very best it should be entertaining and possibly inspiring!

5. Tour (cont.)
Boxes/tabs in general: These can be whatever you want and can change to suit your needs. And, you
can also create custom tabs using a Facebook app called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language).

6. Types of posts
Programs
Breaking News
Collections
Resources/Services
Highlighting Staff
Partner organizations

7. Programs
Almost any and all programs make good posts. Posting only a few days ahead is optimal.
We’ve found that the Events box/tab doesn’t work for our purposes. Our system is too
large and our programs too numerous to update. Instead, we steer people to the Event
Finder link on our webpage. Use bit.ly or tinyurl to shorten your links.

8. Breaking news
Library closings for holidays or renovations, power outages, website problems, new
branch openings, library trends in the news, etc.

9. News items/publicity
Brag about your library by highlighting stories in local newspapers, blogs, etc.

10. Collections
Feature unique parts of your collection. We’ve highlighted such things as our Black
Resources Collection, our new circulating Kill-A-Watt energy meters, our John Wilson
Special Collections Room, etc.

11. Library resources/services
There are all sorts of hidden gems buried in your website. Pull out choice links to feature.
For example, we’ve featured our Ask the Librarian and Reference Line services, library
podcasts, the Central Library Eco-Roof, our database subscriptions and steps on how to
get a library card, etc.

12. Highlighting staff
Any library’s greatest resource is their staff. Feature staff members at various levels in
the organization doing unusual or interesting things. For example, we’ve featured a staff
member who was on Jeopardy!, a Page who was a Rose Festival princess, and a
Children’s librarian who swam the Bosphorous Strait. We’ve also posted about staff who
write book reviews or other articles for our largest paper, The Oregonian.

13. Partner organizations
Don’t leave out your partner organizations. At various times we do posts featuring the
Library Foundation, Friends of the Library and our Title Wave Used Bookstore.

14. Responding to comments/questions
Responding the same day is ideal. But if you can’t manage that, try to
do it within 24 hours.
Fact check your responses with others in your organization. Get ideas
for verbiage from those who know the most about that particular
issue.
Thank fans for their questions/comments. Use informal,
uncomplicated language and keep an upbeat, friendly tone.
Remember that you are speaking for “the Library”. Use the “royal we”
at all times and avoid using “I” in your posts.

15. Comments
Here are a few examples of comments and responses.

16. Post removal
Have a policy in place for when and how to remove posts. Copy any posts before you
remove them and then keep a file of the removed posts for reference if needed. At MCL,
posts containing the following are against library rules and will be deleted before posting
or removed by library staff:
Copyright violations
Off topic comments
Commercial material/spam
Duplicated posts from the same individual
Obscene posts
Specific and imminent threats
Libelous comments
Images Camille Schmierer Hello! I represent Hampstead Stage, we are a not for profit national
touring children's theatre company. Our mission is to bring as much theatre to youth
across the United States as possible! We just launched our fanpage on facebook and
wanted to introduce ourselves. Our performances are primarily held in libraries... and
schools (K-8th).Please feel free to check out our fanpage where we'll be posting
updates on tour schedules, performances, workshops and auditions! Thanks!
Cj Sellers GP, Chris Lugo (a really great guy I know from way back), is running for
Congress in the Portland, Oregon area (District 5). If you'd like to see a Green beat
the pants off a Democrat for a change (some *real* change), help us to send Chris
Lugo to Washington DC November 2nd, 2010. Please like this page and pass the
word. Elect Chris Lugo for Congress!
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17. What works/best practices
Fresh content every day, or nearly every day. No more than one post a day with
occasional exceptions. People are suffering information overload these days. Don’t
overwhelm them with too many posts!
Invite staff to send ideas for content—don’t try to do it all yourself. In addition, have a
good back-up system in place for when you’re sick, on vacation or otherwise away from work.
Ask fans open-ended questions. People like to share about themselves and read what
others think. We asked our fans about some of the books they remember most from their
childhood and received a tremendous response. It also serves cross-purposes as many of
the responses were featured in our Director’s Report, the internal staff newsletter, various
monthly reports and the Library Foundation newsletter.
Try to include visuals with most of your posts. We are very visual creatures and our brain
is engaged more when our eyeballs have something to look at. I use Wikimedia Commons to
find copyright-free images. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Category:Pictures_and_images
Advertise your social media presence. To increase the visibility of our participation in social
media and to garner more followers, we’ve placed the FB and Twitter logos on every
webpage on the website, including the catalog.
Start a Social Media group email list. That way, everyone on staff who does social media at
your library can share ideas, news and info.

18. Best practices (cont.)
Consider utilizing the Favorite Pages feature. Use it to feature organizations you have a
partnership or affiliation with.

19. Best practices (cont.)
Look at other library Facebook pages for ideas on how to improve and optimize your
page. You will get inspired!

20. Best practices (cont.)
Having an RSS/Blog tab is great. We use ours to feature our blogs. You might also want to
consider an Ask a Librarian tab. I see you have yours under TRL Services, which is also a
nice way to go.

21. Best practices (cont.)
Keep up with trends in social media. You can learn a lot from the movers and shakers out
there. These are just a few.....
David Lee King
Mashable davidleeking.com
mashable.com
Wired
wired.com
Tech Crunch
techcrunch.com Jenny Levine
theshiftedlibrarian.com

22. Best practices (cont.)
Post Insights will help you keep up with how your page is doing (on the left side of your
page). Only page administrators have access to Post Insights. You can learn a lot about
the demographics and likes/interests of your fans.

23. Best practices (cont.)
Use Google Calendar to keep track of what you want to post so others are on the same
page as you and so you can plan your posts into the future.

24. What doesn’t work/lessons learned
Try to steer clear of anything potentially politically-charged. Two examples: Director Park
and Eco-Roof posts. Director Park opened a block from Central Library and was funded by
public and private money. Seemed innocuous enough, but turned into a debate among fans
about where city money is spent. The Eco-Roof post was just me posting pics of the roof in
bloom but soon it turned into a debate about where city money is spent. And although civic
engagement is encouraged, just tread carefully. You can’t always predict when fans will want
to pick apart something you or another fan says, but generally speaking, if you stick with
posts that are focused on library programs, services and collections, you are less likely to
have problems.
Monitor various sections of your page for content that may be inappropriate. We had a
situation where someone posted a photo of a library employee from a fan claiming that she
was a “homewrecker”. NOT COOL! I’ve also seen comments/questions long after an original
post, way down the wall. Scroll back down the Wall to be sure you haven’t missed
something. In the same vein, think twice about having a “Discussions” tab. We steered
folks to it for our Everybody Reads/One City, One Book program but it didn’t really take off
and it was one more place we needed to monitor so we removed the tab.
Encourage staff to become fans, but make it clear to all library staff that only certain
staff members are responsible for disseminating any official information about the
library. It’s confusing, misleading and potentially damaging to have undesignated staff
chiming in on the page. Without administrator privileges, staff can’t post original content, but
we have had a handful of instances of staff chiming in on a post with incorrect info.
Encourage staff to communicate with those responsible for posting if they have questions or
concerns about page content.

25. Further investigation
MCL Social Media Policy (handout)
Sandtraps in Cyberspace? How to Avoid
Social Software Policy Pitfalls (PLA, 2010
presentation) http://multcolib.org/products/
presentations/plasocialsoftware2010.pdf
Today’s presentation available on SlideShare.
http://www.slideshare.net/kimbera
My contact info: kimbera@multcolib.org

26. Parting glances
• The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg. Opens October 1.