Interesting stuff, good to have this discussion happening. Thanks.

1. Be careful about the temptation to follow everyone who follows you. Because of automation and spamming, there are a lot of fake followers who hop on in hopes that you automatically follow, they then tweet spam, and your followers’ content shows up on your twitter homepage. I don’t want invitations from Bambi to be what people see when they go to our twitter page.

2. One way to differentiate between followers and ’special followers’ is to use Twitter’s ‘list’ function. I work with the American Evaluation Association. While we have lots of people and groups that we follow (but not all, see item 1), I also have created a list of people who tweet primarily about evaluation. This much smaller list is what I recommend others consider following if they are new to the field – they aren’t going to get much junk from this set nor personal tweets. The list is much much smaller. You need only use the add to list option within twitter (and you can set up multiple lists too on different topics). People can then follow your list – be sure to add yourself to the list! Oh, and when I’m really busy, and have only a quick moment for listening, I can view just the list (I use hootsuite) and see if there is any great content to share. It isn’t that the others don’t have occasional great content, but the list is likely to be the most dependable source.

3. As of January 1, we started a 365 blog – posting a tip-a-day from and for our members (see http://aea365.org/blog/). A great intern manages the blog and it gives us one item each day to add to our twitter feed.

4. Twitter is a great content management system. Your twitter feed can be shared via other avenues in order to increase its readership. Here are five places we share our twitter feed:

i. Look on the right hand side of the blog in item 3, it always shows the 4 most recent twitter posts via a wordpress plugin-in. (this took about a half hour to set up, and once in place it is no additional time)

ii. On our association website, we have a page dedicated to the tweets http://eval.org/aeaweb.asp (another option on your website is to use a widget that can add it to a sidebar). Note that on our website, most people don’t even realize that the page with the tweets is even related to twitter because of the way we’ve formatted it. (because of the approach that we took, this took about a half day to set up once, but the time will vary quite a bit depending on how you want to display it, and once in place no additional time each week)

iii. Our tweets are added to the news feed on our LinkedIn group (this takes all of two minutes to set up once, no additional time each week) – and another LinkedIn group related to our field also picked up our feed as part of its news

iv. Each Sunday, we take the week’s tweets, categorize them (don’t miss, from the blog, and of interest), clean them up (getting rid of twittereez such as hashtags and @replies – using ‘recommended by’ for instance instead of RT and changing twitter names to people’s names or business names) and then drop that set into a separate wordpress blog that is set up and fed through feedburner which means that people can subscribe to it via email. Thus, we end up with an option where people can sign up to receive via email a once-a-week list of headlines and resources from the association, comprised of our week’s twitter posts. Again, for this, most people wouldn’t realize it originated in twitter. (we just began this, it took about four hours to set up and then a half hour a week to clean and resend)

v. We send the same item in iv to our legacy listserv, that we’ve had for 10+ years. (extra 60 seconds to send weekly)

So, while it looks like there is a great deal of time and effort, our thoughts were that if we were going to invest the time in nurturing a twitter feed, that we could make the best use of that investment by making sure that those not on twitter, who wish to see it, also have access, via avenues that were comfortable for them (webpage, email, listserv, LinkedIn). We’re getting very positive feedback and lots of clickthroughs (99% of our tweets connect to resources, blog posts, or other items in the field).

Thanks for the great post!

Opinion on following those who follow you differs from person to person, but for what it’s worth, I suggest that you follow everyone who follows you.

I say this because of the DM. A follower can not send you a direct message unless you follow them back, so for me it would be rude not to do this.

Jim

Your statement that 15 – 20 minutes/day will be enough for a Museum to maintain the Twitter account brings me to another issue about which I would like to know your opinion:

The following policy

As a relativly newby on Twitter I can identify three strategies:
1. The Snob
2. The Selector
3. The Buddy

1. The Snob only follows the chosen few. Most likely other museums or hot shots in the Culture business.

Museo del Prado 78:92,293
MoMA 1,069:58,484
Brooklyn Museum 706:26,707
Tate 517:29.000
Van Gogh Museum 349:3,100
ZKM Karlsruhe 34:753

I guess the communication signal is: ”We reserve the right to communicate with whom we want. One way communication only. You are welcome to listen, but pls refer from any reply because we are pretty busy. Definitely no time for DMs.”

Seems to be appropiate for ”National Institutions” with lots of tourists as visitors and a more anonymous audience, which does not mind to be kept on a distance.

2. The Selector follows a realativly big crowd, but has significantly more followers.

Guggenheim NYC 1,780:14,098
LACMA 7,975:9,137
SFMOMA 6,189:9,570
Tate Liverpool 2,872:3,205

The communication signal seems to be ”We follow whoever interests us, but we don’t follow everybody back. We are interested in a broader communication, feel free to reply to us and you can expect an answer. If we think you are a friend you can even send us a DM. We use two way communication as a marketing tool.

Downside: The rules for ”who is a friend and who fails the test” are unclear and might lead to frustration.

Seems to be appropiate for Museums with a big audience and regular local visitors, with whom a relation on a more personal level is possible and desired.

3. The Buddy ”if you follow me, I shure follow you too!“

Getty Museum 21,607:21,485
Museumsportal, Berlin 2,140:1,992
Guggenheim Bilbao 539:546

Hard to find. Nice to be followed by one of the ”big ones” but without the touch of exclusiveness. Q: ”Will they have the time and be able find read my replys in this mass of tweets?”

Seems to be a little bit blurry and too little exclusive to be attractive for a museum to follow this strategy. But seem to work for Getty. Fear of too many replys and DMs?

Most museums seem to follow Strategy 1 even if they don’t fall into the category ”National institution“ and have a more local audiance.

How do you see it? What is your advice for the following policy? What is your personal experience? How do you handle it? Pros and cons for each strategy?

Pls excuse any/all mistakes by a non native speaker. Hope the text is still understandable.