Ah, social networking. I can't even remember how long I've been using Facebook - close to the time it started and word was just starting to get around about it. You won't be able to see any info about me on my FB page because I have painstakingly tracked down all the privacy settings and changed them so that strangers can't kidnap me from my little league game. Only my friends can. :D You'll know it's me because my profile pic (right now) is of a green unicorn My Little Pony cartoon. MLP is really big right now - don't judge.
The best part about Facebook for libraries is that A LOT of people use it, so there is the potential to reach out to a lot of your patrons. The YS staff at my branch started using FB several years ago to connect with our teen group. ** WARNING!!! CREATE A PROFESSIONAL FACEBOOK ACCOUNT JUST FOR CONNECTING WITH PATRONS ** It is seriously poor style to let your (teen or adult) patrons see pictures of you smashed at your birthday celebration, etc. Keep all those goodies on your personal page - under heavy privacy settings.
Facebook is constantly changing it's policies, settings, and format, so you really need to keep up with the changes. Most of the time there is nothing you really need to do besides re-memorize where to find everything on your "wall" - which can be enough - but sometimes they get tricky and change privacy settings on us. Normally, on a professional account, this wouldn't be a problem, because you aren't posting anything inappropriate (right?). However, Facebook recently made a change to the system allowing other people to "tag" you in any one's photos. So naughty little mischief-makers could fake-"tag" you in an inappropriate picture and it will show up on your photo page. Yay. Even if it's (clearly) not you, it's still not cool to have those kinds of pics up there. I'm not if they have fixed this issue yet. Because my page is private, only my friends can tag me and only my friends can see the pics, so I'm not all that concerned about it.
Another cool and (semi)useful feature is the FB chat function. Although it's definitely not the best chat device out there, it's useful that it's linked to FB. If someone has a question they can just chat directly with a librarian right from the library's FB page. The best new feature of the FB chat is that the FB "message" function keeps track of the chats. So if you miss a chat IM - like, if the internet just stops working or FB reloads or something - it will show on your FB page that you have a message and you check it and get back to that person. You can also set up notifications that can be forwarded to your regular (non FB) email or directly to your phone via SMS.
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