Museum Marketing

This is an article which I wrote for latest issue of Museum ID magazine about Twitter for Museums, it hopefully acts as a good introduction for anyone thinking of using the social network for a museum or gallery.

Twitter

The big internet success story of 2009 was undoubtedly Twitter, the ‘micro-blogging’ platform which, with the help of celebrity endorsements, grew from an estimated 6 million users to 18 million users in just 12 months, and which is predicted to rise to 26 million in the coming year.

The growth and success of the website didn’t escape the attention of museums, and by the start of 2010 over 1000 institutions in 34 countries had joined Twitter, attracted by a potentially large audience and an easy-to-use, free platform.

So what is Twitter?

Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ platform; a website where people share what they are doing or what they’ve found with others by sending and receiving messages known as tweets.

What defines Twitter is the short format of these tweets, each message is limited to just 140 characters of text, making it quick and easy to update.

These messages are sent and received through the website Twitter.com or through third party applications which bring these messages or tweets on to a computer’s desktop or a mobile phone.

As well as tweeting a message, you can also retweet or forward a message which someone else has written to your followers. If you write engaging, informative and entertaining messages on Twitter, you should find that people retweet what you are writing too.

While tweets and retweets are public and anyone can read these, direct messages are private and can only be read by those who you send them to. However the person you wish to direct message must follow you, for you to have permission to send them a direct message.

How is Twitter useful to museums?

Most museums are attracted to Twitter as a marketing tool; it can act as a modern day mailing list, allowing a museum to quickly broadcast information to a large number of people who have opted to hear more about your museum.

However once a museum joins Twitter it will quickly realise that the website is more about community, and using it to only broadcast advertising messages will quickly turn people off. Instead a museum can speak with those who choose to follow them, to entertain, engage and inform Twitter users with a behind-the-scenes and up-to-the-minute account of your institution. This can build a loyal following; a kind of museum membership for the 21^st century.

Twitter is also a great way to share information with your followers; the majority of tweets feature links and by linking to content on other websites, you can advance your museum’s educational aims through the web.
How to get started with Twitter
I would recommend anyone thinking about setting up a Twitter account for their museum first joins the website as an individual. This will allow you to get to grips with how Twitter works and learn from museums who are already tweeting.

It is easy to find museums through the search facility on Twitter. You can follow as many institutions as you like and you don’t need to confine yourself to any one country. MoMA (their Twitter name is @MuseumModernArt) is seen as the leading institution on the website and they are a great Twitter account to follow and to learn from.

One thing which you will learn from MoMA is that even though this is a large and prestigious museum, they identify the person who writes on behalf of the institution and allow the tweets that they write to have personality.

With only 140 characters of text to work with, tone of voice is incredibly important on Twitter and your museum will need to become comfortable with writing in a more down-to-earth, snappy style.

This research period is also a great time to look for people speaking about your museum, because even if you are not writing about your museum on Twitter, the chances are that your visitors are. You can use the search tools on Twitter or an external site such as SocialMention.

Get those around you involved in thinking about how Twitter could fit with your organisation and start to map out some ideas about how you could launch and manage a Twitter account for your museum.

The activities that you’ll need to think about are:

Listening – every day you should do a search on your museum name and look at what people are saying about your institution – are they asking a question which you can help them to answer?

Broadcasting – you should broadcast two or three tweets a day. I recommend that you plan the majority of these out in advance with themes like Museum Fact Monday, Guess the object of the day, Behind the scenes pictures of an exhibition being built or links to video of an event on YouTube. Asking questions is another great way to encourage your followers to engage with your museum – if you’re wondering what a particular audience group would like from you, why not ask them?

Replying – you should set aside some time every day to reply to messages on Twitter. You should also discuss with your colleagues issues such as how you will respond to negative feedback. Most museums have guidelines for dealing with complaints offline and these just need to be revisited to consider how they can work on Twitter.

Don’t let the thought of negative feedback put you off joining Twitter, though, the chances are that people would make the same negative remark if you were not on the website and having a presence there will allow you to change opinions and learn from your mistakes. When you look at the Twitter feed for other museums, you’ll see that there is usually a very positive, sharing vibe since their Twitter followers are some of their biggest fans.

When you feel that you have a good grasp of how the website works from your experience with a personal account, and you have thought about how you will manage Twitter day-to-day then you are ready to set up an account for your museum.

Attracting followers
Unless you set up a feed to your website or Facebook page, the only people who will see what you write on Twitter will be those who choose to subscribe or follow your museum’s tweets, so it is important to keep attracting new followers.

The easiest way to get started is to add a Twitter logo to your museum website and to spread the word virally to staff and through them to their friends. You may also want to add your Twitter name to leaflets and to promote it in the museum.

With your editorial plan in place, you will have lots of interesting content to share and your followers should hopefully retweet this to their own network of followers and start to virally spread the word about your museum.

You can also try offering incentives like a prize draw for tickets to a new exhibition, or reward your 1000^th follower with free merchandise from your shop.

What next?
Twitter is predicted to grow over the next twelve months, but it has also spawned something of a cultural shift with more and more people sharing their experiences in real time.

In late 2009 Google started to index these real time live casts in its searches and now it is becoming more likely that the first result that someone finds when they search for your museum will be a review from someone who has just visited your venue, rather than your official website.

In terms of the opportunities for sharing, casting, connecting, surveying, broadcasting and reaching your audience, the Twitter possibilities are endless.

The momentum for follow a museum day on February 1st continues to build, and I have checked the hashtag (#followamuseum) as the week has progressed.

Today I noticed a tweet which read:

This was followed a few hours later by:

I thought it was worth highlighting these messages, as Dea has pointed out two area’s of best practice on Twitter which many museums do ignore.

Firstly, Twitter is a person to person network and it is important to say who is tweeting on behalf of your museum. For example the Brooklyn Museum Twitter homepage profile reads:

We’re the Brooklyn Museum and happen to be one of the oldest and largest museums in the country. Who tweets on this page? Shelley B. is on deck.

The other criticism which Dea made was that many museums don’t follow the people who take the time to follow them. Again it is best practice to do this and it can look like a museum is not interested in it’s audiences if you fail to do this.

Do you agree that museums should show the real person behind their tweets? Do you think that museums should follow those who follow them?

Earlier this week I suggested that we should organised a ‘follow a museum’ day on Twitter to encourage people to spread the word about all the great museums who tweet.

This idea received several hundred mentions on Twitter within hours and along with comments posted on this blog, these encouraged me to create a portal for this initiative (www.followamuseum.com).

This website will be central to follow a museum day, but the real work will take place on February 1st, and we need everyone who wants to promote museums to play a role and tweet to encourage people to follow a museum.

Your tweet might look something like this ‘February 1st is follow a museum day, who will you follow? PLEASE RETWEET #followamuseum’.

Adding ‘ please retweet’ is very important, as research shows that a message containing this is more likely to be retweeted (honestly, it works).

I hope everyone will get involved…

I read with interest today about Bill Gates joining Twitter and amassing a following of more than 236,000 people in a little over 24 hours.

The Museo del Prado is the leading Museum on the micro blogging website with 92,431 followers, but as I wrote earlier this month, most of the 871 Museums on Twitter have fewer then 500 people following them.

Of course quality of followers is more important then numbers, but I wondered if we could co-ordinate a mass retweet for February 1st saying ‘Today is follow a Museum day” and get people on Twitter to think about following a Museum.

If the Museum community on Twitter worked together to get this message out, then perhaps we could collectively get more people to engage with Museums on twitter.

Would you retweet the message about Follow a Museum day? What do you think?

Where to start with Twitter
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ platform, a website where people share what they are doing with others by sending and receiving messages known as tweets.

What defines Twitter is the short format of these tweets, each message is limited to just 140 characters of text, making it quick and easy to update.

These messages are sent and received through the website Twitter.com or through third party applications which bring these tweets on to a computers desktop or a mobile phone.

Setting up your account
To use Twitter you have to join the website (though it is possible to browse the website without joining) selecting a username which you will be known by on the website. Twitter limits the length of usernames to 15 letters, so you may find that you have to abbreviate the name of your museum to fit within this limit.

Please note: I would recommend that those thinking of using Twitter for their Museum, first join as an individual to get to grips with how the website works.

Once you have filled out this information click ‘Create my account’, this will take you through two steps, the first asks if you want to check if any of your friends are on Twitter by checking for members against your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL address book. You can skip this step with the link at the bottom of the screen.

Next you will be offered twenty suggestions of people to follow, these are a mix of celebrities, bloggers and institutions and are unlikely to fit with your organisation, so I would suggest that you skip this step with the link at the bottom of the screen.

Once you have joined you will find yourself on your Twitter homepage, as you are new to the website this won’t yet contain much.

Clicking on ‘Settings’ on the menu in the top right will let you add a little information to your Twitter page, like a ‘One Line Bio’. As Twitter is primarily a person to person network, Twitter etiquette suggests that you should mention who is writing on behalf of the institution in your biography.

For example Brooklyn Museum’s biography reads:

‘We’re the Brooklyn Museum and happen to be one of the oldest and largest museums in the country. Who tweets on this page? Shelley B. is on deck.’

You should also add your Museums website address to your profile information, this sounds obvious, but you would be surprised by how many institutions have missed this vital information.

Location is another important category for a Museum, as this will make it easier for people searching for members in your area to find you.

As well as writing about your museum you can also show a picture both as an icon, which will appear next to everything you tweet, and as a background image which will appear in the background on your profile page.

The icon is 48 pixels x 48 pixels and most Museums use this to show a picture of the exterior of their building, this can be added in GIF, JPG or PNG format on the ‘Picture’ page found in the ‘Settings’ section.

You will need to use a photo editing piece of software like Photoshop to create this icon.

Your background image should be around 1200 pixels x 800 pixels, again this can be a GIF, JPG or PNG file. As the amount of information that you can write in your Twitter accounts biography is limited, many museums include more information in this background image. You can change your background image on the ‘Design’ page in the ‘Settings’ section.

If the colours in your background image don’t sit well with the default Twitter colour palette, it possible to alter this by clicking the ‘Change design colours’ button on the ‘Design’ page.

Whilst you are in your settings you might also want to alter the ‘Notices’ that you will receive from Twitter, the default setting is that you will be emailed every time that you receive a follower or a direct message, while this is exciting to recieve when you get your first few followers, you will soon get tired of it when you are receiving 30 notifications a day.

Getting started on Twitter
Now that your page is up and running, you are ready to start Tweeting. At the top of your Twitter homepage you will see a box that says ‘What’s happening?’

Type ‘is now on Twitter’ in to this box. You will notice that as you type, the number on the top right reduces, this shows the number of letters you have left to type. Click the ‘update’ button and post your first Tweet.

Your first tweet should appear under the text box. You will notice that it has your icon next to it, and starts with your username (which is why we didn’t type YourMuseum in the message)

Following
Now that you have set up your profile and posted your first Tweet, it is time to find someone to follow.

Twitter users see the messages or tweets that other users post on Twitter on their homepage, but only if they follow them. This is the way that most people will see what you write on Twitter.

You can find people to follow by using the ‘Find People’ button on the top menu. There are around 1000 museums on Twitter and it is a good idea to follow cultural organisations in your area.

When you go to another users Twitter homepage you will see a ‘follow’ button under their username and icon, click this to start following them.

Below this you will see a list of their tweets. Browse through these and as you hover your cursor over each Tweet, you will notice that a ‘Reply’ and a ‘Retweet’ button appear.

Select a message that interests you and click the Retweet button. This will rebroadcast this message to your network of followers. Retweeting is an important part of Twitter and it is common for people to Retweet things that interest them.

As well as sharing good information, content or links with your followers, retweeting also makes you more visible to the person or organisation who originally wrote the tweet and makes it more likely that they will follow you and retweet things that you write.

It is important not to retweet too much, stick to messages which you think will benefit your followers.

As well as following people or organisations which interest you (from an institutional point of view) you should also follow those who take the time to follow you, this is important as they will not be able to direct message you unless you do.

Reply
As well as retweeting messages, you can also reply or send a message to another Twitter user, either by clicking the reply button on their Twitter homepage or by using the @ symbol before their username in a Tweet.

A reply is posted publically on Twitter so if you prefer to keep the message private then you can use a direct message.

Direct Messages
A direct message is a private note, this conforms to the 140 characture format of a normal tweet, but is a way of privately corresponding with other Twitter members.

It is only possible to send a direct message to people who are following you.

Links in Twitter
If your linking to information about exhibitions or events, you are likely to want to use website addresses, but these are often to long when Tweets are limited to just 140 charactures.

The way around this is to use a URL shortening service like Bit.ly, this will not only allow you to shorten the length of website addresses, but also lets you track how many people are clicking on each link, which can be useful when measuring the benefits of using Twitter.

What’s a hashtag?
Twitter users use hastags (which look like this #) to link together messages about the same topic. The most common use for this is for events and conferences, however some Museums have started to give each exhibition a hashtag and promote this in promotional literature.

Writing
As well as engaging with other Twitter users, you will also post your own tweets. The amount that Museums do this differs from organisation to organisation, but I’d suggest that you aim for two tweets per day including weekends.

You can choose to either write your tweets on Twitter as you go, or to schedule them using a web based service like Hootsuite or Socialoomph.

Schedule
Between listening, conversations and writing your own tweets you can expect to spend between fifteen and twenty minutes per day managing your museums presence on Twitter.

This would be roughly split into ten minutes in the morning, five minutes at lunch time and five minutes at the end of the day.

Creating a Twitter editorial plan
A mistake that I see many Museums making is to use Twitter to broadcast events listings. Twitter is a great promotional tool, but nobody will follow you if all they are going to get is adverts.

An editorial plan is a good way to get the most out of Twitter, this will set out how much time you will spend on the social network, how often you will tweet and what you will tweet?

This plan should be set out like a weekly diary, with actions penciled in for each day.

How much time will Twitter take?
Twitter is the least time consuming social network and shouldn’t need more then 15 – 20 minutes per day. This will be broken in to a few different actions.

Listening
Firstly you should monitor what people are saying about your Museum, this can be done by either by using the search facility on Twitter or by using a desktop application like Tweetdeck.

When you find someone mentioning your Museum, you should reply to them as you think appropriate (Glad you enjoyed your visit, You should visit this weekend as we have a new exhibition).

As well as searching for people mentioning your Museum, you might also want to use Twitters geographical search facility to look for people in your area looking for something to do at the weekend.

Ideally you should monitor Twitter for mentions of your Museum two or three times a day.

What should a Museum tweet?
Museums need to think beyond using Twitter to announce their latest exhibition, or they will struggle to attract many followers.

An important part of your editorial plan should be not only how often you will use Twitter, but also what you will say in your tweets.

If you intend to post fourteen tweets on Twitter every week, then you need to break this down so that you know in advance what you will write for each day.

For example, every Monday you might post a photo of an object of picture from your collection using Twitpic and ask your
followers to guess what it is. This could be a regular feature for your organisation on Twitter.

Every Tuesday you could tweet about an important historic event which relates to your collection.

Every Wednesday you could link to pictures on Flickr or films on YouTube which have been created by visitors.

As well as these pillars of your editorial plan you should also tweet about things that are happening behind the scenes in your Museum, for example if you are fitting a new exhibition link to pictures of this on Flickr.

Many people who use Twitter on behalf of Museums tell me that they keep a notebook for idea’s and encourage their collegues to share idea’s with them.

You can find my previous blog post on writing more interesting Museum tweets here

What shouldn’t a Museum tweet?
Twitter is a person to person network, and it is important for the person speaking on behalf of your Museum to appear friendly and approachable.

Having said that you need to remember that you are writing on behalf of a Museum, not the best friend of those following your institution and they don’t need to hear about your holidays or social life.

Increasingly Museums are putting guidelines in place to help to control this relationship between the members of staff representing the institution on social networks and their audiences.

Attracting followers
Being interested in people who mention you on Twitter and following people in your area is one ways that you will attract followers on Twitter, but you also need to think about what you do outside of Twitter to tell people about your presence on Twitter.

Your website is the most obvious place to start, add a link to Twitter on your homepage or ask your web designers if they can make your twitter feed appear within your site. You can also signpost people to Twitter through your e-newsletter or Facebook page if you have one.

As well as directing people to Twitter from other places on the web, you should also consider including your Twitter username on the back of leaflets and having signs asking people to tell you about their visit via Twitter, some Museums are even giving each exhibition a hashtag.

Measuring success
What success looks like will differ from Museum to Museum, this shouldn’t just be how many people are following you, but should be about the level of engagement that you are able to achieve with the Twitter community.

- How much are people talking about your Museum?
- How many people have you @replied to?
- How many people have @replied to you?
- How much are you tweeting?
- How many people are clicking on your Twitter links?

You may also want to try and connect Twitter and the real world by having a special event or exhibition preview for your followers on Twitter, how many people will show up?

Conclusion
Twitter is a great tool for Museums to build communities around their brands online, it is easy to use and costs nothing but your time. If you haven’t tried Twitter yet, why not join today and give it a go?

Related Posts:
Tips for creating more interesting tweets for a museum
Research in to Museums on Twitter
How to measure your success on Twitter

Lets face it, some Museums don’t use Twitter for much more then broadcasting events listings, and press releases about upcoming exhibition, but to attract a good following on Twitter, you need to create content that people really want to read.

Here are a few tips for creating more interesting tweets for your Museum:

1. Add pictures - There are lots of ways of getting links to pictures in to your tweets, Twitpic pictured above is one of the most popular. You could post pictures of a new exhibition being built, an event or exhibition opening or even objects from your collection.

2. Fact of the day – Did something relevant to your collection happen on this day in history? Do you have an interesting fact about a historic figure connected to your exhibitions which you could share with your followers? Why not have a fact of the day?

3. Link to your visitors video and pictures – Have you found pictures posted on YouTube or Flickr by your visitors? If not have a look and you might be surprised how many you find. Could you link to a picture or video of the week?

4. Ask a question – Ask you followers something, this could be for their opinion on something or it could be a weekly Museum quiz relating to your collections.

5. Twitter as a historic figure – Got an exhibition connected to a historic figure? Can you get your curators to help you to write tweets as that individual, do you have a diary which you could tweet extracts from?

6. Talk about what is going on behind the scenes – Museums are interesting places, and people are interested in what is going on behind the scenes, tell your followers about some of these experiences.

7. Retweet - Has somebody said something nice about a visit to your Museum on Twitter? When they do, be sure to share that with the rest of your followers by retweeting their comment.

8. Talk to people – Check daily for people talking about your Museum using the Twitter search facility, and answer peoples questions and contribute to these conversations.

Related Posts:
A step by step guide to using Twitter for your museum

Tweetfunnel seems like a tool that a lot of Museums could use, it allows you to have multiple people from your organisation tweeting on one Twitter account, with functionality which allows an administrator to manage and approve everything before it is posted to Twitter.

I’d love to know if anyone tries it out!