When I met Mark Zuckerberg…

Facebook Masterclass

OK, so I lied! I didn’t actually meet Mark Zuckerberg, but I got your attention, right? I did however get the chance to recently visit Facebook HQ in London for a rare masterclass, organised by UK Online.

My employer (Solihull Libraries) was one of five prize winners, drawn at random from all the centres that had registered an event for Get Online Week. Although I’m not directly involved with delivering initiatives such as myguide, I am responsible for running the Solihull Libraries Facebook Page, so was delighted to have the opportunity to attend.

We were met in London and taken for lunch by Vicky Lawson, Communications Manager at UK Online before spending the afternoon at the Facebook offices situated just off Oxford Circus. It was a shame not to be given a tour, but as I understand it there isn’t much to see! This is because the London office mainly deals with sales and regional support. Sarah Abbott a member of the PR team at Facebook gave us a short presentation which covered Facebook’s development from a Harvard dormitory to 500 million monthly active users. No matter what your personal views about Facebook its success is staggering, some of the most interesting statistics from Sarah’s presentation were that:

• the 35 plus demographic is the fasting growing in the UK with 8.6 million users
• there are over 900 million objects that people interact with from pages, groups, events, etc.
• average users create 90 pieces of content per month
• more than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month

Sarah covered the basic layout of the Facebook profile, the privacy settings and the difference between ‘Pages’ as opposed to a ‘Profile’. It was interesting to observe how some of the other prize winners were unsure about this, fearing that they needed to create two Facebook accounts to keep work and personal separate. After showing us examples of pages from a variety of brands it was time for us to have a go on some shiny Mac laptops (which naturally pleased me)!

I have to say that this masterclass would have been just what I needed a year ago. Having already set-up a page which I use on a daily basis there wasn’t anything I hadn’t already covered, although some of the hints and tips regarding continent were useful and focused my attention on more of the conversation, rather than the just the news giving element which you can easily get carried away with. It also highlighted the power of video and photos rather than just text.

I commend Facebook and UK Online for offering us the opportunity. I think we all left infused about the potential of using Facebook as a marketing tool and the afternoon did get me thinking about how to use Facebook for promotion of the library as a UK Online Centre, which after all was why I was sent there! I’ve now set-up an additional page and provided some training so that another member of staff can promote this aspect of the service using the social networking site.

I’ve also been exploring Facebook Places, the location-aware service which was rolled out in the UK in September and I’ve been busy adding our libraries.

It remains to be seen what impact this will have, but I’ve always felt that libraries need to be where people are, in the virtual as well as physical sense, and with 500 million monthly active users on Facebook, the small amount of time taken to claim an entry and populate it with the library’s details, seem worth it in the long run with the possible reward it presents in terms of raising our profile within communities.

I am keen to find out how other public libraries are using Facebook and in particular the new Places feature, so if you would like to share any thoughts or ideas, please leave a comment below.

Photos courtesy of Vicky Lawson (UK Online).

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