Museum Marketing

One of the questions I always get when I talk about Twitter at conferences is how can we measure it’s effectiveness. Yesterday I gave some measuring your museums social media activity and in response to that article some pointed me in the direction of Ad.ly Analytics.

I don’t think there is one perfect stats package for Twitter yet, but this website gives you some interesting information which could look good when reporting back on your online activity.

The stats start by indicating how many of your followers are engaged with you, that probably isn’t the best description of what it is measuring which is how many people who follow you are active on twitter and not just spammers or dormant accounts.

The next measure is how many of your followers are male and female, it would be interesting to see how this measured up against the ratio of visitors walking through your doors.

Then we have a map of where your followers are. As institutions with a physical presence in one place I would expect a museum to want to have more followers near that physical location rather then spread around the world.

Next we have activity in the past 30 days with the number of mentions, retweets, tweets and time of day for each of these (though I don’t think the retweets measure is accurate).

Then we have most engaged followers and more influential, again I don’t think this is very accurate as museums like MoMA and The Getty Museum who follow me don’t appear on the list of most influential followers, which Ad.ly describes as ‘Your most influential followers are those that have the most followers themselves’.

Next we have something which I think could be really good for putting together a report about your museums reputation on Twitter, this charts the number of positive, neutral and negative comments about your institution.

Then finally we have keywords surround both what I have written and tweets that mention me.

I don’t think that Ad.ly Analytics is the perfect solution for statistics on Twitter, but it is certainly worth checking out and should provide some interesting data for a museum.

The Twitter blog has shared information about a new feature which they are currently testing out called ‘Contributors’, this is aimed at businesses, but I think it could be really beneficial to museums too.

This ‘Contributors’ functionality enables multiple users to contribute to one Twitter account, this will help large organisation to keep the conversations that they have in this space authentic by showing the person tweeting on behalf of the museum.

As shown above the user ‘biz’ is writing on behalf of @twitter, this could be a really great addition which would mean that different departments within a museum could all tweet in an identifiable and easy to understand way through one main Twitter account.

This is one of the new features that Twitter is trying out, ready for release next year, but we will have to wait to see if this is going to be a service that you need to pay for.

For the sixth month I have looked at museums on Twitter and the number of people following them, the latest research can be downloaded here.

There are now 654 institutions on the list with 808,750 people following them.

Yesterday I mentioned the Twitter Opera and the large amount of press coverage that it had generated for the Royal Opera House, today I discovered something similar using dance.

The Dance Workshop Theatre ask their Twitter followers to send them a movement which they then choreograph in to one dance and film. This seems like a nice, fun way to engage with their audience on Twitter.

This seems to me like an inventive way for The Dance Workshop Theatre to build links with their audiences, and I am sure it will be more effective then just using Twitter to advertise performances.

I think this is a lovely use of Twitter, not only to engage new audiences, but also as a promotional tool. Just how much is the press coverage that this idea generated worth to the Royal Opera House?

1. Tell your readers who is speaking.
Twitter is a person to person network, and the people who use it like to know who they are talking too, so even if your tweeting on behalf of an institution, you should let people know who you are.

Here is an example of how Brooklyn Museum do this on their Twitter profile.

2. Be a person, not an institution.
The big advantage of saying who is writing on behalf of your institution is that it allows you to be a human being rather then an institution. The way that people speak to each other on Twitter is very informal and if you start to send messages that sound like they have been written by the PR department, then you’ll stand out as having not taken the time to understand the way people use Twitter.    

3. Tweet often, but not too often.
Getting the frequency of your tweets right is a tricky business. Remember that you’re still a museum, not my best friend and I really don’t need to hear from you three times a day.

4. Follow people
It is polite to follow the people who have taken time to follow your institution, it also means that people can send you direct messages.

5. Take twitter in to the real world
Many institutions set up a Twitter account and don’t link it to their real live venue.

Take a look at this card I noticed recently in Brooklyn Museum, are you sign posting your visitors to Twitter?

6. Use Twitter to show a different side of your organisation
Think about the interesting things that happen in your organisation which might interest your followers (in fact write them down). Museums are fascinating organisations, and while it wouldn’t be appropriate to post pictures of your stuffed baboon being cleaned on your corporate website, Twitter is the perfect place to share stories of what happens behind the scenes.

7. Don’t just broadcast
Twitter is a platform for conversations not just another space to broadcast information about your latest exhibition. Get involved in discussions with the people who follow you, and take the time to reply when someone mentions your institution.