Social Media Stuff - Facebook and all that
Talking to various museums people at a conference recently, it’s interesting the amount who haven’t started using social networking sites as yet, or indeed the wider internet in general. I thought I’d just remind people of what we’ve done and what’s worked well…
We launched our Facebook site a few months ago. It was easy peasy to set up and it’s now one of my favourites to update as it just takes 2 seconds, reaches everyone immediately and is a good way of sharing info. We now have 42 fans on Facebook! Please follow us if you haven’t done so already - search for ‘East Lothian Council Museums Service’. We used the Museum of the University of St Andrews as our model for this so check them out too.
Our websites are operated using Website Baker. It’s just like using a word processor to update your pages. I just trained two people on it this morning so we can update the John Gray Centre website.
Our YouTube site definitely needs more work. It’s one of the things I’m going to get round to after Christmas - I promise! At the moment it has a variety of films, many to do with the loco No 6. We’ve had a little spurt in people subscribing and requesting to be friends recently without us doing anything really!
Flickr remains as one of our most used sites. We recently posted photos of the Suffragette March and Multi-Cultural Day, both which were attended by lots of people and it was a really easy way of sharing the photos. One tip - always give each photo a title and description. I hate it when photos are up but you have no idea what they are of!
Survey Monkey has also been our saviour on many an occasion. It’s a website which lets you carry out questionnaires free of charge online. We pay for the more advanced service because of the amount we use it. We’ve used it many times this season to analyse visitor surveys, carry out consultation with communities and to gain feedback from events. It’s so simple to use and you can download reports containing graphs, percentages and pie-charts which make reporting back much easier. Perfect for those strapped for time to do proper evaluations.
Our collections are also on Scran - you can access this free from any library and it contains collections from museums, galleries, archives and libraries from across Scotland.
We haven’t branched out to using Twitter yet. I don’t know if it’s really for us, but we’ll see…
Any other suggestions as to sites other people have used that are useful, please leave a comment and spread the word!
November 28th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Make that 43 fans!
I’d be interested to know a little more about how many hours each week you and colleagues put into social media work, now that you’ve got things up and running. (and how much you put in - for the love of it - out of hours)
You asked about tools: I’ve become a convert to Hootsuite.com as a tool for writing/scheduling and posting updates to Twitter and (just added this week) to Facebook. For an organisation it seems an ideal tool, as it lets you grant and remove staff access for writing posts to Twitter/FB without giving them direct access to all the account settings, or the ability to delete the account if they were so minded! For big organisations, keeping control of what staff do with social media sites is clearly very important.
Personally, I think Twitter seems easier to set up and manage than Facebook (call me biased!), and can be much more responsive to users. I like the hashtag #museumfactmonday for promoting info about a museum and the fact that it can be updated by RSS whenever your blog or website is updated.
Out or interest, why did you choose to create your FB page as a “Fan” page rather than as an “organisation”. Were there extra advantages that you saw to this.
Love your blog - keep up the great work.
November 30th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Hi Nick,
Thanks for becoming a fan! To be honest, now that we’ve got most things set up, I usually only put about 1-2 hours a week into our various sites. This usually goes up if we’ve got an event on - adding it on Facebook, putting the photos up on Flickr and maybe writing a blog about it. I use Facebook at home too so I do tend to check it out of work too - rather sadly!!
I’ll go on and have a look at hootsuite - sounds good. We made one of our seasonal staff this year able to edit our Facebook page and then removed rights when she left. It is difficult though to give over editing of a site like that, especially when you’re the one that puts up most of the posts!
I can’t quite remember about Facebook but I think we might have said we were an organisation and then people could become fans of us. If anyone knows differently, please correct me!!
Thanks for your comments.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Belated thanks for your reply, Sarah. I was hoping you’d say somewhere between one and two hours a week, which I guess is reasonable, especially if you can get different people to share some of the workload and responsibility, as well as doing stuff from home. (I like the way the East Lothian blog offers contributions from various people at all levels within your service.)