A “Book and Digital Media Studies” student (wow – what a cool-sounding program!) emailed me last week, asking about my favorite university library Facebook Pages. Well … to be honest, I can’t say I frequent university library Facebook Pages much.
But I followed up a bit, and did a search in Facebook for university library then narrowed the search to Pages, and found over 500 university libraries with Facebook Pages.
As I browsed through the list, I started noticing that some Pages had low friend counts in the 0-30 range, and many were in the 70-200 range. And there were a handful that had thousands of friends:
- TSDAS Digital Library, Open University Malaysia – 2141 fans
- Green Library, Stanford University – 1438 fans
- UP Diliman University Library – 4630 fans
- Silliman University Library – 2789 fans
- UCD (University College Dublin) Library – 1433 fans
- University Of Warwick Library – 1529 fans
- Yale University Library – 1167 fans
Why do these Pages have more friends? Glancing through them, it looks like they are doing one thing – they are humanizing their Facebook Pages. What do I mean by that?
They’re “doing stuff.” Stuff like this:
- Posting regular status updates
- Interacting with visitors in the comments of status updates – some status updates have 20-30 comments, as well as “Likes”
- Pointing to stuff that’s happening in the library (ie., lectures)
- Regularly add photos and videos – sometimes hundreds of them.
- They use Facebook’s Events feature to list events.
How about libraries with a low fan count? Here’s one example – the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Main Library, with 7 fans. What are they doing? Nothing. They have 1 status update, from August 2009. Their most recent activity was adding the library’s website url, mailing address, and phone number.
So, to answer the question “Do students friend university library Facebook Pages?” (I hear that one a lot) the answer would be yes – IF those pages are being humanized. Looks like the pages with high fan counts have constant activity streams. Pretty much every day or so, something is happening on those Pages – there are regular status update posts, photos or videos are being added, and event reminders are being posted.
Basically, activity attracts Facebook users. Think of your Facebook Page like a party. Anyone ever attended a dead party? If there’s nothing going on, the party goers quickly find an excuse to leave, because the party is boring, right? In the same way, if your Facebook Page has no updates … your party is boring, and you are inviting your students to go do something else.
This is easily fixable if you do one simple thing. Post an update every day, and make it interesting. Examples from the Fan-heavy pages above include helping students out – pointing to a book/resource that has the “answers” for an assignment, just sharing an interesting tidbit of university or library news, sharing quotes, etc. Pretty normal stuff – just shared with Facebook users.
But if you’re not human, if nothing’s going on … no one will show up to your party.
Bunny by Alyssa Miller
{ 13 comments }
