http://twitter.com/museoreinasofia

@p_sully, tweeting as @magnes

http://www.twitter.com/TibetanMuseum

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.

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.

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)

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.