Museum Practice

Christine, although admittedly part of a large company, our visitor centre initially set up a facebook group independant to the main social media plans. Much of the work was done by one of the bar staff on quiet shifts!

It can be suprisingly easy to run and maintain, as between a group of us we make sure that the page is checked at least once a day for any messages we may need to reply to. When we advertise an event we plan into that advertising a few minutes to copy and paste the details into an event invite. We then know that a few hundred people will recieve that invite and know about the event without even needing to leave their home or visit our website.

You can ultiimately spend as much or as little time as you like on it, you can delve as deep as you like into reults and statistics. I do think that for a few minutes per day, or even every other day, it's a good return on effort.

Rebecca, try programs like SearchTastic and TweetScan to bring up timelines.

With a project we did in the NW last year, we definitely had footfall increased by using Twitter/Facebook. There's a growing generation that get their information this way, and it will be an increasingly effective (and cheap) way to market events.