The Facebook experiment

A few weeks ago while re-pondering the assignment I had just submitted, an idea popped into my head for a way to evaluate the need for a library presence on Facebook with a fan page in the local community.

We had just taken delivery of 8 rather large barrels FULL of Lego (on lend from Lego) for a school holiday program running in our regional branches and there was one barrel left over after redistribution.

Cutting a long story short it was decided to run a Lego activity for one hour on the Saturday morning of that week with no other advertising than through existing local fan pages on Facebook.

The experiment outlaid no cost as there was no expense spent on advertising the program only the time invested to post, the program ran during the regular story time hour that runs during the school term so staffing was already allocated and the equipment for the program was free of charge.

I promoted the event using my own profile through the TAMWORTH MUMMIES AND DADDIES PAGE :), the local radio station fan pages, through my own status and posting on various walls of friends.

The Saturday of the Lego activity also coincided with the start of the annual Country Music Festival which is notorious for causing parking problems in the CBD. Despite this we still has 13 children attend the session with 9 adults. A significant point however was that none of the people who attended where regular library user, we had actually attracted non user to the library quite possibly for the first time! There were also many expressions of interest through the comments functions from people who couldn’t make it to the session, but wondered if and when we would be running it again.

Our library does not yet have a Facebook page and I'm hoping to use this experiment to strengthen our case for establishing one.


Photo's of the fisihed product where taken and emailed out to families