Facebook (Thing 2)

Hi!

Thanks for stopping in.  My second thing is

Well, my second thing is social networks, properly speaking. Now, in my personal experience, (much to founder Mark Zuckerburg's delight, I'm sure) when most people say "social network" they are talking about the popular website, Facebook. Because of this presence in popular culture I'll focus on Facebook in this post. Now let's talk about

Thing 2: Social Networks (Facebook)
www.facebook.com

Sure, you think you know about Facebook. Wikipedia informs us that Facebook was founded in 2004 by Zuckerburg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, it was originally intended for use by Harvard students only. It quickly expanded to allow students from Boston colleges, the Ivy League, and Stanford to create personal accounts. By 2006, any person who could provide a .edu email address could have an account. The site's next expansion allowed high school students and finally anyone over the age of 13 to create personal accounts. A fictionalized narrative of its beginnings was depicted in the 2010 blockbuster The Social Network. 

On Facebook people can create personal accounts for themselves or business accounts for celebrities and businesses.  Many University libraries claim patrons can

The university I currently attend, University of South Florida (USF) has a page dedicated to its Tampa campus library. In my opinion the page is fairly active with 1,778 people "liking" (read following) it and posts about upcoming classes, programs, events, and other points of interest nearly daily.  

I've also studied at Georgia State University, in Atlanta.  Like USF, Georgia State's Library also has a presence on Facebook.  Its page within the site has slightly fewer followers than does USF's, but its posts are somewhat more frequent. There are sometimes multiple posts on the page per day. 

Since Facebook is so ubiquitous in popular culture as to boast having over 900 million active users, and given the site's roots as a college start-up social media site, I think it is a good idea for University Libraries to maintain pages on the site.  My caveat regarding blogs stands with Facebook too, though.  These sites must be actively maintained. Beyond this concern,  I also think it's worth mentioning that Facebook is notorious for changing its privacy policies and navigation style within the site, so I think that librarians or others who maintain a University Library's facebook page must stay current regarding changes to the site that might affect the library's users.  

Finally, I feel that if University libraries choose to utilize social networks to get information to the communities they serve, it would be a good idea to have a volunteer advisory board to help the library staff stay up to date on the sites' formats and policies, as well as to keep library staff in the know about what social networking sites are the new hotness with students.  

~J