Feral Librarian

I know Library Facebook pages are old news, but my post on Our Library Facebook Page continues to get plenty of traffic, so I figured it was time to update the story of Green Library on Facebook.

We now have 2,846 people who Like us (up from 809 in July 2009, when I last reported our fan numbers); and I remained convinced that we are the most popular academic library on Facebook. Yale is close behind with 2,839, so I hope all the Stanford fans reading this will head over to Facebook and Like us.
We have not done any paid Ads since summer of 2008 — all of our new Fans/Likes have been gained organically.

We still get plenty of interaction on our page, with 40 comments/likes over the past week (I expect that number is higher during the academic year). We are averaging over 1000 monthly active users. Despite early fears on the part of many in the library community, we have not had any problems with flaming or negative comments.

I’m convinced that our success is based largely on the fact that we post interesting content, tailored to the interests of people who truly Like libraries. Most of what lands on our Facebook page is pulled automatically from our blog, but occasionally one of the Facebook admins will post something just to Facebook. The Facebook only posts are usually just quick links to outside articles of interest, often humorous (or intended to be humorous).

The best part of the story is that we have been able to leverage our Facebook presence to recruit participants for some usability testing for new website prototypes. We tried many other venues to recruit participants, but Facebook was by far the most successful.

For us, Facebook provides an extra venue for interacting with people who Like us; and the small amount of effort dedicated to keeping it up to date is certainly worth it.