Reaching Students with Facebook

This article is in the Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, v.8 no.2 (Summer 2007).

Do you keep stats on your Library 2.0 traffic? If you have a presence on Facebook or MySpace, what kind of questions or interactions do you get? The Penn State librarians who wrote this article indicate that their Facebook inquiries exceeded their email or in-person inquiries during the Fall 2006 semester.

My experience has not been as successful. My library’s MySpace page has a lot of “friends” but the amount of questions received has been very light. My feeling is that most of the questions were posted soon after the sender accepted the “friend request”, when the library’s page was fresh in their mind. Since my initial burst of friend requests dropped off over the summer, fewer questions have been received. As another poster here discussed, keeping up with your 2.0 stuff is time consuming. Is it worth the work? Maybe I need to try to incorporate some of the Penn State librarian ideas. I’d like to hear from others about the amount of questions they receive.