Yesterday was #followamuseum day on Twitter and the initial signs are that it was a success. The hashtag was used at least 6,000 times (I don’t think this is counting all the tweets as this service missed about 50 which I wrote myself) and the website received in excess of 10,000 unique visitors.
I want now to pause for a minute and ask you to share the number of new followers that your institution gained on follow a museum day and to ask what will you do next to engage with these people?
Recorded MOSI’s followers on the 31st as 643 and looking at the new followers tonight (2nd Feb) we have 702 which is a bigger increase than usual. Didn’t experience much spam at all.
Think the main thing, as many other people have said, is to keep followers engaged and provide an interesting, worthwhile service.
Aloha Jim & other Museum Twitter Folks!
*Mahalos for the idea, the organization, the participation, the follow-thrus!
*It was absolutely thrilling to see museum culture trending in nations & major cities across the globe
*at EHCC/HMOCA, we welcomed 80 new followers (in any given day we range from 0-100)…so this was great! At the moment we are at 3,379 followers, still aiming to break thru the 5,000 mark! We also began following 30 new orgs as we already had a fairly solid group of museums on our radar before yesterday’s happenings
*Hilo, Hawaii is a relatively small town, so we are delighted to meet our global kindred souls thru twitter & YouTube!
*Maybe as important, or more important, we met new organizations, connections thru the day and intend to continue our collaborations & explorations together
*Feel free to DM questions, thoughts, ideas
*Sending all warm alohas from the islands!
Thank you Jim for organizing this wonderful pro-art initiative!
Park West Gallery (@ParkWestGal) gained about 10 followers yesterday, which is fantastic! We also sponsored an art giveaway through our blog — one of our followers won a free art print for tweeting the #followamuseum day hashtag. The contest was certainly a big hit!
Park West Gallery was glad to participate in #followamuseum day and we’re certainly looking forward to the next one!
As someone who blogs fairly frequently about museums and upcoming exhibitions, I was happy to jump on board. You can read my blog post about the event here:
http://www.gypsysguide.com/2010/02/5-reasons-to-follow-museum-today.html
When you do this again, I’d encourage you to reach out to bloggers to help spread the word. I blog about travel and art — with a specialty in Italy. I am always happy to tell my readers about great museums in their neighborhood or in the destinations to which they travel. And there are lots of museum enthusiasts out there who can do the same.
Just to echo most of the responses here, thank you for organising the initiative – it was fabulous to be part of it!
My key two thoughts:
- Because we’re based in Australia and Twitter is still it’s in early(ish) stages, we didn’t really gain too many local followers (which for me, was one of my aims). We did gain some other museums/gallery followers, which is important in building a sense of community with in the industry.
- The initiative illustrated there is a real benefit when the museums/galleries of the world get together to do something collaboratively – we should be doing more things like this.
MV Outcomes @followamuseum
For Museum Victoria (@museumvictoria) and it’s other venues that we promoted as part of #followamuseum (@melbournemuseum, @scienceworks_mv, @immigration_mv), we gained:
MV – Additional 35 followers
MM – Additional 41 followers
SW – Additional 21 followers
IM – Additional 25 followers
Where to from here
The trick now is keeping the broad section of our followers engaged. Broadly speaking, there’s two kinds of followers:
1) overseas followers (and mostly within the industry) – I am assuming they experience MV (mostly) online (or at a conference);
2) our local followers who have a higher propensity to visit our onsite venues, engage in our competitions, etc.
MV Twitter Strategy/SM Strategy
One of our key aims of our Twitter strategy is to encourage our visitors to provide us with feedback, share thoughts about their visit (both good and bad), photos of their experience, answer their queries, etc.
Thanks to everyone involved! Can’t wait for the next one!
Magna Science Adventure Centre picked up 18 new followers! @MagnaScience love the campaign and will certainly support all year with our Twitter!
Hi Jim,
@7stories picked up about 40 new followers which was great and you helped us break the 500 mark which we’re very pleased about. It was a great way of reaching out to new museums and @7stories started following about 10 new museums.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Jim,
Firstly congrats on a great initiative. I am writing to you from The Model arts centre here in Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland. For us twitter has provided a unique way to communicate with our audiences during a period of redevelopment. It has also connected the entire arts community in Ireland.
Looking at our stats, it would appear that we gained around forty new followers in one day. This usually takes about two-three weeks to gain this many, so it was tremendously successful for us to participate in. We currently have 771 followers tweeting with us. It was also great to see the #followamuseum topic trending in Ireland.
We’ve written a full blog post here on success of the day for us. http://bit.ly/8YbD94
Thank you to Jim Richardson, and thank you to all our new followers. We are looking forward to the exciting year ahead and tweeting with you!
-Denise-
Oh the most important thing- we are @modelsligo on twitter!
Blog posts covering follow a museum
http://www.gadling.com/2010/02/03/its-follow-a-museum-day-on-twitter/
http://www.culture24.org.uk/sector+info/campaigns/art75590
http://musematic.net/?p=1029
http://cybernetickinkwell.com/2010/02/01/followingfollowers/
Let me know if you have seen any others.
Jim
Loved this event! It was a great way to promote museums – art, science, history, culture – of all sorts. We started following a number of museums
Many thanks and congratulations Jim – #followamuseum was great fun and super successful!
@Tate gained about a thousand followers over the span of the day – which is absolutely brilliant! Not only that, but it’s also been growing very quickly since then too. Unscientifically (sorry), I’d say that in a few days, we’ve seen the sort of growth we might expect over a month.
We ran two ticket giveaways during the day – one asking who you were following for #followamuseum and one asking what your favourite museum was and why – tagging replies with #followamuseum. This was really successful and interestingly most replies came after the giveaway had closed – I was RT-ing brilliant answers till about 11pm GMT.
We also posted on our Facebook page and encouraged anyone there who was a tweeter to get involved.
I’m sure that the fact that @Tate was at the top of the UK museums directory contributed to the rapid follower growth, so we’re very grateful for that. A few people queried whether Tate was actually a museum – we did say that #followamuseumorgallery might have been a bit unwieldy!
What I would love to know is whether our followers want us to follow them back. I agree that we should be asking our followers (new and old) what they would like from us and finding out what it is people are actually following museums for.
It seemed to me that through out the day, people all across Twitter were totally engaged with the whole idea of following a museum and were tweeting about why museums were inspiring and exciting – what a fantastic outcome!
Well done and thanks again.
Hi Kirstie
I loved the competitions.
I think your success also has a lot to do with the perception of your brand. TATE is very easy for people to associate themselves with, because it’s a very cool brand.
Jim
[...] Mehr als 1.500 neue Follower für twitternde Museen, das ist doch ein schöner Erfolg für den 1. Februar, den MuseumMarketing-Blogger Jim Richardson initiiert hat. In UK und den USA schaffte es #followamuseum sogar in die Top Trends. Insofern kann Jim Richardson berechtigterweise von einem Erfolg sprechen. [...]
[...] Some reviews include Culture 24’s Follow a Museum day eclipses England captain and iPad to become hottest topic on the internet, Musematic’s Follow a Museum Day, and Cybernetik Inkwell’s On Following Followers, With Help from Miss Manners. You can of course follow the exploits of Jim and his crowd with a follow up blog post on Museum Marketing’s own Follow a Museum Day. [...]
YuffyMOH had 871 followers before and 893 after which is an increase as we usually only get about 5 new followers a day.
I think it went well, and was pleased to see it as a trending topic (at least in the UK), which made me smile!
[...] it together and I guess everybody tweeting for a museum will agree it was a success. According to the comments most participating museums had between 4 and 6 times more new followers than on an average [...]