There have been a number of articles and papers recently about using social networking sites such as Facebook for marketing the library.

There are some extremely powerful considering this: most students will have an account on Facebook, Bebo or one of the other networking sites (probably Facebook). According to data from comscore, Facebook had around 1.6 Million UK users in Jan 2007, 12 Million in Feb 2008 and 22 Million in Feb 2009. Between June 2008 and June 2009 the number of UK Facebook users in the UK in the 15 – 24 year old age group increased by over 50%.

Of course it might be a bubble, a trend that will go up like a rocket and down like the stick.

But it might not. There are already a number of papers around suggesting that such sites might be useful for marketing purposes by libraries. Examples include a paper written by David Xia and published in Library Management (Volume: 30 Issue: 6/7), and an earlier case study published by LASSIE: “Libraries and Social Software in Education”.

Marketing (like any activity) is expensive. An early decision, for any library that choose to go down this route, will be to decide how to monitor the effectiveness of any expenditure in this area, bearing in mind that positive returns may require investment in time and and the accumulation of experience.