Facebook offers museums a way to connect with over 500 million people, and it is not surprising that many institutions have taken steps to make it easy for the public to show their appreciation or affiliation by adding a Facebook Like button to their museum websites since Facebook launched them in April 2010.
The Facebook Like button provides an easy way to spread the word about your institution virally, and with the average Facebook user having over 130 friends, you can quickly gain a lot of attention through this simple tool.
When clicked on, a Facebook Like button posts information about the website, exhibition, painting etc that the user ‘likes’ on their Facebook where their friends can see it and share it with their friends too.
Research suggests that the people who click Facebook Like buttons are more ‘social’, having on average twice as many Facebook friends as the typical Facebook user, so this is a valuable group to appeal too.
Jasper Visser, Project Manager for new media and innovative technology at the Nationaal Historisch Museum in the Netherlands wrote about his experience with Facebook Like buttons in a recent blog post ‘I’ve been adding Like Buttons to many of our websites and the results are significant. Conversion is high and traffic from Facebook increased.’
This experience isn’t rare, and Facebook itself quotes statistics suggesting a large increase in referrals from the social network is the likely outcome of adding Facebook Like buttons to your website.
However while museums may note that they have a Facebook fan page on their homepage or in a website footer, most are not applying the Facebook Like buttons to the extend that they could to leverage the maximum exposure for there institution.
A Facebook Like button works best when it links to specific content rather then say a website or an organisation as a whole, so making it possible for a visitor to your website to ‘like’ individual items in your collection or individual events will be more effective then encouraging them to ‘like’ your museum.
Ultimately technology may take this kind of sharing into the gallery.
A prototype developed at a workshop run by MediaMatic in Amsterdam lets visitors swipe an RFID tag next to a real world Facebook Like button to make it appear on their Facebook page, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this technology to start to appear in museums over the next 12 months.
If you have added Facebook Like buttons to your museum website I hope that you will share your experience in the comments below, if you are interested in adding this to your website you can find out how to on the Social Plug-in section of Facebook.
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This article was written by Jim Richardson, founder of MuseumNext and managing director of Sumo, an agency with a reputation for developing innovative digital marketing.Jim regularly speaks at conferences and contributes to publications on social media and digital marketing.
Thanks for the post. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any studies or have any thoughts about using the Facebook Like button vs. a Facebook share icon. I see on this blog you are using both (on in the title line and the Like below the image.)
At the Art Institute of Chicago, we currently use the share icon on our Artwork detail pages (i.e. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/27992) We’ve talked about adding the Like button-but I’m torn on whether having both on the artwork page makes for too much Facebook. But the two function differently-the Like is quick and easy to see popularity from the page-but the share allows for more personalization of the commentary on FB. I’m not sure what is best for our audiences. Insights welcome!
Thanks,
Liz N.
Art Institute of Chicago
Hi Liz
Thanks for your comment. The research from Facebook would suggest that moving from the Share button to Like button has a major effect on traffic, and Jasper Visser seems to back this up from a museum perspective.
Personally I have always received very little traffic from Facebook to this blog, however knowing that I was writing this blog post, I added the Facebook Like Button last week. The effect was been dramatic, with a ten fold jump in the amount of people sharing links to our blog on Facebook and a far higher jump in traffic from Facebook.
Perhaps it is easier to ‘like’ something, rather then ‘share’ it.
Jim
Hi Liz & Jim,
Regarding the difference between like & share buttons: I remember reading both serve a different audience. Share has a more in-depth result, whereas like is “lighter”. The difference in how both are displayed on a user’s wall, especially when s/he likes a lot of pages, is clear: Shares are better. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the link to the article…). The little data I get from FB Insights supports this impression, so I’d recommend to offer both: Shares for the people who want to actively share and Like for the simple thumbs up.
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