Over the past week I have looked at why a museum should set up a Facebook fan page, discussed how you can make this look attractive to potential fans and touched on how to create engaging content.
In this article I am going to look at how you can promote your Facebook page to attract fans.
Start with your friends: Virally building your fan base starts with your friends, simply click the “Suggest to Friends” link on your fan page and select those friends who you think would enjoy engaging with your museum on Facebook to become fans.
You should spread the word internally within your museum about your new fan page and get your colleagues to sign up, and suggest becoming a fan to their friends. As your fan base grows you will find yourself linked to more and more networks of friends, and as people engage with your fan page this will feed back to the people who are connected to them, and encourage them to investigate your fan page for themselves.
This is why it is incredibly important to create good content which people can engage with, because good content will be spread virally.
Promoting your Facebook page in existing channels: You wouldn’t produce a leaflet without your website address on it, and increasingly your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and You Tube sites are becoming just as important. With this in mind, you should consider signposting all your social networks on printed promotional materials.
As well as printed materials, you should also link to your Facebook fan page from your museum website, and talk about it in your e-newsletter and on other social networks.
I would also encourage museums to look at ways to tell visitors to the museum that they can be found on Facebook, whether that is a poster in the café or a notice on your information desk.
Facebook Advertising: I haven’t seen any museums using Facebook advertising to promote a fan page (though I have used it successfully myself to promote museum websites) but this may be something you wish to consider because of the low cost and the fact that the people are obviously already on Facebook.
Facebook advertising also allows you to target your advert at people in your geographical area, and to target specific interests or age groups.
Search Engines: I am always surprised at how hard some museum fan pages are to find, both with Facebook’s own search facility and with Google. Make sure that your page contains enough information about your museum that the person visiting it doesn’t need to go to your main website and that should provide enough content to make your fan page stand out in search engines.
Do you have other ways in which you have promoted your Facebook fan page? Please leave a comment and tell us what has worked for you.
Yesterday I looked at how you can create a great first impression with a landing page for your Facebook fan page, and while this will help you to attract fans, you need to have interesting content to keep them coming back.
Why does it matter if people come back to your page? Because the more that a person interacts with your venue, the more likely they are to visit in the real world.
Update your status: The status updates are one of the most important things about your fan page, because once somebody has become a fan of your museum, these update will appear in their primary news feed.
These status updates should be used to create engagement with you fans, don’t just broadcast information, ask questions and invite people to share their opinion with you.
Coming up with original content 365 days a year can be quite stressful, but remember that you can always post links to other peoples content (including stuff on your main museum website). Creating content which engages, informs, entertains or just makes people smile will keep them coming back to your fan page.
Remember the social media editorial plan: I’ve written before about having a social media editorial planfor your activity on social networks. Ideally you want to plan out your updates in advance and where possible use the same content to feed both your Facebook status updates and your tweets on Twitter.
Respond to your fans: As well as creating good content, you also need to respond to your fans comments and show that your museum is ready to listen and that engage with them.
Encourage your fans to add content: Encourage your fans to add their own comments, pictures and video to the wall on your museums fan page. This will make your fans feel more engaged with your museum and has the added benefit of virally spreading information relevant to your museum to all of their friends through their feed.
Share your photos and video: Pictures and videos are a great way to give people a behind the scenes look at your museum, whether it’s a picture of your new dinosaur being installed or an interview with a curator.
Another good way for a museum to use photos would be to hold an exclusive exhibition preview for your fans and then post pictures of this on your fan page for people to tag themselves in. Each time someone tags themselves in a picture, this will appear on their news feed to their friends. This could virally spread the word about your museum to thousands of people.
I mentioned Apps yesterday, and Flickr and YouTube Apps make it possible to link your content on these other social media platforms .
Competitions: Competitions are a good way to encourage your fans to keep coming back. The prize doesn’t need to break the bank perhaps a ticket to a new exhibition or an invitation to a preview night.
One idea which I like, is to ask your fans to create a new profile photo for your museum, this is very simple, but really allows your fans to effect how your museum.
Don’t forget your goals: It is easy to get carried away with Facebook, but you need to keep in mind that your reason for having a fan page, this should be to help your museum to achieve its goals.
This is why I’d recommend a social media editorial plan, so that your content is (to some extent) planned out with your goals in mind.
Yesterday I discussed why you would want to be on Facebook and how to get started with a Facebook Fan Page. Today I want to focus on how you can make your fan page really stand out.
Landing page: Adding a landing page on to your fan page is one of the ways which you can make a big first impression for new visitors, big brands like Coke and GAP have been using these for a while. The landing page below is one recently created for the fan page of Seven Stories in the UK.
The landing page of the Seven Stories fan page highlights upcoming events, exhibitions and contains book reviews, this is all compelling content which gives a great first impression of the museum and the fan page.
As well as creating a good first impression, your fan page needs to be packed with interesting content and one of the ways to do this is with Apps. If you have a personal account with Facebook then your probably aware of Apps, on a fan page these allow you to add useful functionality which will make your page more engaging and sticky for your fans.
Some Apps which you may want to consider adding to your museum fan page are:
Twitter App – this automatically pulls your tweets in to your Facebook
YouTube BOX – connect your YouTube content with Facebook
MyFlickr – connect your Flickr content with Facebook
There are thousands of Apps on Facebook, check out what other museums and brands which you admire have installed on their fan pages.
With over 300 million active users Facebook is the worlds leading social network, and has even ranked higher then Google as the world most visited website at times over the past twelve months.
The chances are that you are a member of Facebook, and as such you have a profile on the social network. Many museums also have a presence on Facebook, these aren’t profiles as you as an individual might have, but a Facebook page (something which is sometimes also referred to as a fan page).
Facebook groups v fan pages Facebook allows you to set up two kinds of pages for your museum, either a group or a fan page. While the difference between the two may not seems obvious until you join the website, a museum will be better served by a fan page.
To view a group you need to become a member of Facebook, but anyone can view a fan page without logging into the website. This makes a museum choosing to set up a fan page more visible than one choosing to set up a group. Secondly, if you send out any invitations or emails from a group, they actually come from the administrator of that group (complete with your picture), rather than the museum. If you instead choose to use a fan page then whatever you send to your fans will come from the museum.
Thirdly, a group is limited to 5,000 people whilst a fan page can have as many fans as you like.
Getting started with Facebook pages To create a fan page you will need to be a member of Facebook. Once you have logged in scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Advertising. Then click pages and then Create a Page.
Select the Museum choice of categories and enter the name of your Museum before clicking to create your page (be careful doing this as you can’t change it after you have selected a name for your fan page). You are given the option of keeping the page private, and I’d suggest that you do this until you have added content in to your page.
We have just added information about the speakers for MuseumNext London to the conference website. We are really excited about the line up which includes individuals from some of the world’s top Museums.
The subjects that will be covered at the conference will include: Social Media, Online Video, Museum Gaming, Online Collections and Mobile.
Today we have announced our next event, which will be a one day conference in London.
The conference will bring together experts from museums around the world to share their experience of creating great participatory experiences for visitors both online and offline. We have called the event ‘The Art of Social Media’ however it would be a mistake to think we’ll only be talking about Facebook and Twitter (isn’t everything in the museum now social?).
This event also introduces a new way of selling tickets, with Super Early Bird, Early Bird etc. A certain number of tickets has been set aside for each category, so if you’d like to attend, the sooner you book the cheaper it will be for you.
More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks, and a final programme will be released in January.
The following was first posted by MuseumNext participant Nikki Pugh on her own blog, she kindly agreed that we could share this here. I think it’s a great example of the kind of collaboration that has come out of MuseumNext.
The wikipedia article that @MuseumNext links to includes a list of 19 steps to creating good open source software. My response to this was that I was excited by the prospect of a similar list for open museums.
We rattled off 19 steps that, for the most part, swapped in museum terminology for the software design terms. When I first started writing this post on Tuesday afternoon, it was with the intention of digging a bit deeper to check that what we had here wasn’t just some diverting wordplay. I thought I’d supplement each step with references to things that were discussed at the MuseumNext event and it would nicely serve as a redux for Suzanne and others who weren’t able to attend.
Anyway, it didn’t quite work out like that. We really did cover a lot of stuff at the event and most of it was brainstorming in small groups – so even the attendees only have a small part of the overall picture of what happened there.
I gave up on this post for a bit, but I’ve not managed to bring myself to delete it. The thing is, these steps are just too relevant to my work and I feel I need them in the system (equivalent of pinning them up on the wall by a desk) as a reminder as to what’s important for a meaningful participatory approach. So, I’m going to press the publish button after all…
Apologies to Suzanne that this isn’t the nice summary we had both hoped for, but also an invitation for people to chip in with their thoughts. Maybe we can yet use these 19 steps as a framework about which to curate awesome/vital/important things. The comments are yours…
1. Every good project starts by scratching an individual’s personal itch.
Over the day and a half of MuseumNext I met a lot of people who are very passionate about a whole range of different things. We know this is the driving force behind good projects.
We also saw examples of projects that scratched itchy participants: for example Advice: Give it, Get it, Flip it, Fuck it and the Living Library. Maybe a combination of the two is the driving force behind great projects?
2. Good curators know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse). @MuseumNext included the caveat “works if you say everyone is a curator”.
I’m going to reference the original essay “it’s almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.”
After Nina’s presentation on the Friday morning, someone asked where was a good place to find out more about awesome projects – Nina’s blog being an obvious place to start.
I’ve done nothing much more than dip my toes into the world of museum/exhibition design, but I’m aware of a number of people in that area blogging and reporting back on inspiring projects. There also needs to be a place where we can celebrate and openly discuss our failures too (there may be such a place already, either online, or in the form of face-to-face exchanges such as MuseumNext) so we can learn from our, and others’, mistakes. I tried to do this with my How to Wow series of posts and I know it’s not necessarily easy, but it reaps its rewards later down the line.
In our group discussing the Exhibition Gaming wild idea, we kept coming back to the belief that institutions starting to work with games-based projects should think in terms of a programme of games-based projects to give the institution an opportunity to learn and develop.
We also commented that our sessions had generated a lot of questions and that it would be unrealistic to try and answer them all in one project. Choose a few key questions, design for those, then incorporate the successes into the next project.
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. Again, from the text of the original essay: “starting over with the right idea is usually more effective than trying to salvage a mess”. [reference]
I’m using the work “projects” rather than “exhibitions”. “Project” seems to imply more of an evolutional development to me. Maybe there’s an exhibition along the way (I’m resisting saying “at the end”)? Maybe that exhibition has changed form a couple of times?
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
How often do the audience get to nominate the project?
5. When you lose interest in a project, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
I’m curious. How long do museum projects last for? Long enough to sometimes need to find a successor for them?
I also can’t help but think that there’s something in the notion that curators are handing over a participatory project to the audience and that a) the audience/participants should therefore be fully equipped with the skills and resources to get the most from the project and b) the curator should see themselves as only being the first in a line of custodians.
Throughout the MuseumNext event there seemed to me to be a recurring theme of institutions having to learn how to relinquish control.
6. Treating your participants as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid project improvement and effective debugging.
I particularly like participants-as-co-developers as a method of giving co-ownership to the project.
7. Release early, release often. And listen to your participants.
This, to me, implies testing. In my role as game designer, that equals play-testing. I’m learning to play-test components, rather than build it up into a nearly finished whole before I test it. Testing unrefined bits of things makes it easier to throw stuff out. See the section of the “Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?” video below from about 8 minutes in for an example:
“If you try to polish a prototype too early, you become married to it, and you don’t want to make changes…”
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. This reminds me of tales told by Alternate Reality Game designers who spend ages devising the most fiendish puzzles imaginable, only to watch as the players’ hive mind strips it bare in 20 minutes!
9. Smart platforms and dumb content works a lot better than the other way around.
The original “smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around” reminded me of Nina’s diagrams from her presentation:
Institution as content provider …or as platform provider?
10. If you treat your participants as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
&
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your participants. Sometimes the latter is better.
I’m not sure I can add anything more to those two. Maybe the typewriter for comments is a nice illustration of valuing your participants.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
*nods*
13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Can you substitute the word “communication” for “design”? What are the implications for that?
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
This is how smart platforms enable users to steer around dumb content.
It’s also one of the key reasons that I work in the way that I do – it’s so much more interesting to set something in motion and then allow participants to take it somewhere you never dreamed of. Be flexible and responsive when this happens.
15. When designing entry points to the project/exhibition, make it only as difficult as it needs to be. Never throw away feedback
(Original: When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!)
I used some creative license in interpreting this one – mostly riffing off the idea of gateways…
In our games group we talked a bit about providing multiple entry points into a project. Nina also talked about offering multiple engagement points and not focusing solely on creators.
Rather than saying to make entry points as easy as possible though, I think there are cases for providing either a grain of sand to needle at what might otherwise be a no-thought-required entry (fairly literal example, the Would you go to Mars doorway to the Facing Mars exhibition), or to make entry a challenge or a thrill (Ref: Another Exclusivity Paradox: Secret Gardens, Hidden Museums). Thus making entry points just difficult enough and no harder than that.
16. When your institution’s/sector’s language is impenetrable to your audience, change your language. However, don’t patronise.
I’m mostly thinking of a comment made by someone in our group who flagged up that there was often a language barrier between institutions and that terms could have very different meanings to different organisations. I might also be thinking of grumblings in response to this post about the Ashmolean in Oxford.
17. Leave secrets to be discovered for those willing to search for them. Reward curiosity. Particularly with reference to games and not having everything immediately apparent after the first glance, but also the Another Exclusivity Paradox: Secret Gardens, Hidden Museums mentioned above.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. Motivation, motivation, motivation.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the participants/audience, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
Use the communications medium that’s most natural to your intended audience.
Have you got anything more you’d like to add? What thoughts do these spark off for you?
