As part of my research for my upcoming talk at Communicating the Museum, I’ve been looking in to how museums are using the popular micro-blogging website Twitter.
I thought some readers might find the following table of interest, it shows a top 50 based on how many people are following (subscribing to the messages of) the venues tweets.
I have learnt a huge amount from watching the museums listed above and the way that they are using Twitter, it is interesting to see the difference between how the most successful and least successful differ.
If you are interested in joining Twitter, you might find this guide for Museums getting started on Twitter useful.
PLEASE NOTE: Since publishing this list I have been informed of several institutions who have not been included, I have now published a revised list of 380 Museums on Twitter.
dont forget our friends twitter.com/wexarts
nice, thank you, but why is the list unclickable?
By the way, The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a following of 2028. http://www.twitter.com/fieldmuseum.
So your thesis is predicated on the assumption that most successful = most followers?
There are a lot of museum missing from this list – we have 3,056 followers at the moment @COSICols. @MuseumTweets is a great accumulated resource to find more.
Great list.
Also add twitter.com/MOCAlosangeles
[...] Serious tweeters: A U.K. researcher has ranked the top museums on Twitter based on how many followers each venue has obtained. Of the L.A. museums, the Getty comes in at No. [...]
you forgot about lacma, the los angeles county museum of art! they have 3,388 followers.
http://twitter.com/lacma
i meant 3,880 followers. check them out!
You’ve neglected @MOCAlosangeles who has 1400+ followers and @LACMA with 3800+ followers.
Don’t forget
twitter.com/GR_Art_Museum
Also, we at LACMA have a Twitter account with 3,875 followers.
I think it is wonderful that so many museums are on twitter.
twitter.com@LadyJE
2,284 followers here, Jim, I’d appreciate an updated list!
Please kindly add the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, twitter.com/Guggenheim, who launched on 6/8/09 and now has 2,080 followers. Thanks!
I have been following Museums rather closely on Twitter in the last few months. I tweet under the name @Art_news and list myself under the category of interest for Museums. If I were on that list now, I would rank before the Whitney as No. 7 Ironically, the top museum tweeters in general, are responsive with public replies to their queries which generates a sense of community with their patrons. The number one problem with unsuccessful Museum tweeters is that they do not respond to queries, or even post tweets for that matter. Impersonal “announcements” are also considered rather blase, and render a poor impression of museum and their ability to educate their public. Twitter is about “social networking” and requires an institution to be personal. If they are not, why bother interacting. Usually I discuss art issues. I have generated a #MailART network and moderate lively discussions on twitter in the way I have seen no other museum do, except in one instance the @HolocaustMuseum with some help from those on their live twitter tour.
All of this is to say, I would love to see Museums meet the publics desire to be heard and educate. Hire me as your tweeter, and you would see no less than a revolution in a museums ability to do social networking. I am amazed at the present response I have received discussing my artwork with my present personal life reality: the pending birth of my fourth child and my move to another apartment.
BTW You can find my tweets here:
http://twitter.com/art_news
Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an important art attraction here in LA, and they have around 3900 followers @ http://twitter.com/LACMA
I’d be very interested in hearing more about the rest of your research. What is your focus? This is a very useful list – thank you.
erin noseworthy
twitter: HunterMuseum
Hunter Museum of American Art
An interesting list indeed, thanks for sharing (props to MOMA and Brooklyn Museum for blowing everyone else out of the water). However, I’m concerned that the Smithsonian isn’t represented here despite their many Twitter feeds with followers in the thousands. See: http://si.edu/Twitter How did you generate the list?
Wow! A big thanks to everyone for comments and for pointing out the institutions that I missed. I intend to publish a new list at the start of July and i will be sure to include all your suggestions.
The list was generated manually by me going through a list of all the museums I could find on Twitter, someone like the Smithsonian probably didn’t show up because the institution wouldn’t show up on a Twitter search on the term Museum.
I appreciate that this list is far from perfect, but by repeating this exercise over a couple of months and responding to feedback both here and on Twitter I am sure I can fill in the blanks.
To answer a few other queries, I intend to make the July list clickable which should be a big improvement.
Finally, I think that we can probably learn more from those venues who have the most followers, because they must be doing something right to attract and keep 20,000 + followers, is this success… well that depends how they use the medium, but I think you could argue that your more likely to learn best practice from an institution with many followers then one with very few, what do you think?
Thanks again for contributing, I am very happy to listen and very happy to accept any feedback that can help this research.
Skirball Cultural Center
Los Angeles, CA
@Skirball_LA
970 followers
Trackback from Los Angles Times blog:
Culture Monster was surprised to learn that several Southern California art museums were left off a recently published list that ranks museums around the world by the number of followers each has acquired on Twitter. (Thanks to the folks at @LACMA for pointing out the omissions.)
The survey, which we linked to earlier today, was posted online this month by a museum marketing guru named Jim Richardson. Granted, the metric he uses is not particularly meaningful considering the indiscriminate clicking (and grade inflation) that is a given on the Web. But for all of its flaws, it does give you a rough gauge of an institution’s Twitter popularity.
To set the record straight, we’ve compiled our own list of some of the major SoCal art museums with active Twitter accounts and ranked them in descending order. It almost goes without saying: the numbers only represent a snapshot view (as of Thursday late afternoon) and they are in a constant state of fluctuation.
So add your grain of salt, and click through to see which SoCal art museums have the most followers on Twitter…. And while we’re thinking about it, follow us on Twitter @culturemonster
– David Ng
Museum (# of followers on Twitter, as of Thursday, June 25)
Getty Museum: @GettyMuseum (10,847)
LACMA @LACMA (3,893)
San Diego Museum of Art @SDMA (2,846)
Hammer Museum @hammer_museum (1,712)
MOCA LA @MOCAlosangeles (1,437)
Orange County Museum of Art @OCMA (659)
Museum of Latin American Art @molaa (218)
Bowers Museum @Bowers_Museum (152)
Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens @TheHuntington (142)
Fowler Museum @FowlerMuseum (106)
Trackback from ARTINFO:
NEW YORK—Museums, like much of the rest of the world, are piling into Twitter as a way of communicating with their fans. And some of them have respectable numbers of followers, or readers of their updates, led in this category by the Museum of Modern Art, which has 28,803. While seemingly impressive, MOMA ranks only 1,416th among all users, according to Twitterholic.com, a site that measures Twitter statistics. (Top honors go to basketball’s Shaquille O’Neal, with 2.8 million, followed by Hollywood’s Ashton Kutcher, at 2.4 million.)
Rounding out the top five museum Tweeters in terms of popularity are the Brooklyn Museum of Art (23,820 followers), the Tate (14,929), the Women’s Museum (10,918), and the Getty Museum (10,798).
Which of these seems to stand out? The Women’s Museum, which bests higher-profile competitors like the Whitney and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert and British museums in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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While the Women’s Museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian, its ranking may indicate a bit of high-tech savvy along with the appeal of the institution: It follows almost as many Tweeters – 8,639 – as follow it. By contrast, MOMA follows only 726, the Brooklyn, 448, and the Tate, with proper British reserve, 26. The Getty, on the other hand, follows more people than follow it, 10,918. Following your followers on Twitter can increase their loyalty to you as well as raising your profile among people scanning followers lists.
The Women’s Museum occupies a 70,000-square-foot building in Dallas. A current exhibition is “Tall in the Saddle: Cowgirls, Ranch Women and Rodeo Gals,” which includes 75 black-and-white photographs of American cowgirls. The permanent collection includes a 30-foot wall of video monitors called “The Electronic Quilt” that serves as an introduction to the museum as well as a video review of 13 female comedians.
For a list of top museums on Twitter, see Jim Richardson’s Museum Marketing Web site.
Trackback from Real Clear Arts:
I just learned from a blog called Museum Marketing, where Jim Richardson reported here on the “Top Museums on Twitter,” that Brooklyn comes in second only to the Museum of Modern Art among the top 50. When I checked the speakers at the 2009 Communicating the Museum conference, taking place in Malaga right now, I learned that two of the four keynote speakers are from the Brooklyn Museum — Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology, and Will Cary, membership manager. I’m sure there’s more, and these are all good things.
Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art @TibetanMuseum
http://www.twitter.com/TibetanMuseum
the Museum Twibe has a pretty good cross-section of museums as well. http://www.twibes.com/group/museums
@p_sully, tweeting as @magnes
[...] Here are links to the previous research Museums on Twitter July 09 and Museums on Twitter June 09. [...]
Prado Museum (Madrid, Spain) has created this list of Museums on Twitter http://twitter.com/museodelprado/museos
Also adding to the list Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) twittering in Spanish.
http://twitter.com/museoreinasofia