Museum Marketing

With falling budgets and fewer staff one of the big trends in museums for 2010 will be measuring return on investment. I think that will be felt across all the activities in the museum, but I want to focus on how you can measure whether your social media strategy is working for your organisation.

Many museums tell me that their management are still skeptical about how much social media can help them to achieve their goals, and now is the time to start to prove what is effective and to ditch the websites which are not working for your organisation.

I’d suggest that you start with a benchmarking exercise:

How many followers or fans do you have in social networks?
This should be easy to find out. I’d track this week by week and look for how new fans or followers find you.

How much traffic is your website getting via social networks?
Your websites stats package should be able to tell you not only how many visitors you are getting through social networks, but also the depth and length of their visit.

You should also keep a record of other traffic sources to your website so that you can compare the contribution that social media makes to other sources.

What are people saying about your museum?
Use the website Socialmention to check what people are saying about your museum and keep a record of this. How many positive comments are you getting a week? How many negative?

You should also record conversations that you have with fans and followers. This kind of interaction is key to social media and an engaged audience is a loyal one.

What are people clicking?

If you post links on social media websites you should try using services like bit.ly or Hootsuite which let you track the number of people clicking on the links that you post. This will give some indication of the amount of people taking action and engaging with content that you post.

This also tells you what your audiences are interested in learning more about, but you might find that the link title matters as much as the content.

How much time are you spending on Social Media?
It is useful to know how much time you are spending on your Social Media activity, broken down by platform.

But what about your goals?
As you are doing this benchmarking exercise, you need to start to think about what your goals are? Perhaps it is to increase the reputation of your museum, to attract more visitors or create awareness of your exhibition programme.

Goal 1 : Increase the reputation of your museum
Now you have benchmarked your social media activities:

• Measure the growth of your fans and followers.
• Measure the conversations about your museum on social networks.
• Measure any blog posts about your museum.
• Measure click throughs to your website from social networks.

Goal 2 : To attract more visitors
Now you have benchmarked your social media activities:

• Ask fans or followers if they have visited a new exhibition.
• Record people mentioning visits on social networks.
• Record click throughs from social networks to the making a visit page on your website.
• Include social media in visitor research.
• Hold a special event for followers and fans.

Goal 3 : Create awareness of your exhibition

• Measure the number of conversations, links and retweets about your exhibition.
• Measure click throughs from social media spaces to information about the exhibition on your website.
• Look for positive reviews of the exhibition from fans and followers, and retweet.
• Ask those visiting the exhibition to tweet reviews (with notices in the museum)

By recording progress month on month, you should be able to build up a picture of what is working and how much time you are having to spend to generate these results.

Are you trying to measure the impact of your social media activity? What is working for you?