Social networking

Here we go, my first fully-positive blog post with no "yeah, but" statements! (Aside from convincing the powers that be to remove these sites from the internet filters, but I've already mentioned that so it doesn't count).

I have been a member of Facebook for a few years now. Since I grew up overseas and have been in Australia for less than a decade, my network is small but geographically diverse. It's a great way of keeping in touch with people who live far away, and sharing photos, comments and links with people you think will find them interesting. Having said that I am mindful of privacy and identity theft, etc, and have most aspects of my account locked down so that only current friends can see them.

I can't see what the UQ library is doing with Facebook because it's blocked on our network, but one Facebook use I could see being really useful is the "Fan Page". A library could set up a fan page, for example, and they could use it to advertise events or highlight interesting items in their collection. The nice thing about it is that it would be a totally opt in/out situation, where people would only receive the updates if they became a fan of the library, and could leave the group at any time. Or a Facebook "group" could be created - the advantage of this is the discussion threads that can be created.

I can see Twitter being very useful in a similar way. If you advertise the fact that you're on Twitter to your clientele, and they add you to their list of followers, you could let people know when you had a new publication come in that people might find interesting, for example. Also, I know a lot of people use Twitter as a research or polling tool. Like if your library was going to subscribe to a PC magazine you could ask which PC mag people find most useful, and then get an idea of which ones would be the most popular.

Another interesting feature of Twitter is the real time search. If you were to consistently post about topics that people find interesting, they would be picked up by the search and you would grow your followers organically. Again, if people didn't want to receive your messages anymore, they can simply unfollow you.

The one trick to keep in mind with all of this is to post only when you have something that you think people will find really interesting. If you're posting stuff just to post, and you're posting multiple times a day, people will unfollow you at the drop of a hat. I know I have.