I admit this is a pretty “Web 1.0″ concept–buying banner ads on web pages–but it is an interesting idea that I wanted to share with other academic librarians.

Facebook sells advertising “flyers” on the site. They appear in the left-hand sidebar below the navigation links, alternating with the more corporate ad banners. Generally they only show in your network (i.e., your college or university). The examples of flyers that they give are for campus events or “everybody wish Joe a happy birthday” variety. But to me they look like an opportunity to promote the library. (This assumes, of course, that our students are not boycotting Facebook over the controversy surrounding their new “feeds”–though it sounds like Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, got the message.)

So I took our fall PR campaign–”Tutt Library keeps you afloat!”–and made the little flyer for the Facebook that you see here. The parameters are pretty constrained–the image is small, and you only get 25 characters in the title and 200 in the body.

But, at five bucks a day, the price is reasonable, and it seems like the natural place to reach out to students. We are running it every weekday this first week of classes. I expect we’ll do it again for special events or to promote other library services.

Of course, we aren’t the first library to do this–in June the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences News noted Facebook’s popularity and said:

Recognizing the power of Facebook to reach students, large organizations as well as colleges and universities have begun posting ads. Units at the University of Illinois have posted “Facebook Flyers” on the U. of I. network to promote student programs and even a new library toolbar feature.

You can make the flyer link to a web page if you want. Originally, I was just going to link to the library home page, but then I realized if I created a special page, I could tailor my message. So I created this Tutt Library keeps you afloat page to try and highlight some of the services that students (particularly new students) would find useful. How effective has it been? I don’t know yet. I put a counter on that page (don’t even talk to me about the state of web stats at MPOW. Grrrrrrrr.) and a handful (3 to 8) people are hitting it every day, all of them from Facebook (it isn’t linked anywhere else). That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that is the number who clicked, not the number who noticed.

You can choose to put your name on the flyer (as in “Posted by…”), which I did to try and give students the opportunity to say “Hey, I saw your lame/cool Facebook ad,” though no one has done so yet.

Right now, we have the only flyer running at our campus, so I hope we are getting a lot of exposure. Anyone else out there been doing this? With what results?