I've been spending a lot of this week focusing on social media - especially for Preston Museums Group who run the family friendly Preston Hands on Gang. I've been trying out a couple of useful tools to track Hands on Gang mentions, followers, fans and to generally find out where families are spending time on social media sites. I've revisited a few ideas discussed at the last AMA Digital Marketing Day. I'd definitely recommend trying out Social Mention, Klout and Social Media Firehose (big up to Jim Richardson and DK for the top tips).
I'm still not sure how we can prove that social media (and the time and hours put into it by staff) drives actual visits to non-ticketed museums and galleries. Does market research on site (if it's being conducted at all) really show the impact that social media has on motivating visits? There's plenty of ways to track online behaviour, but how does this convert into an actual visit? It's all very well tweeting and re-tweeting information about an exhibition, performance - whatever, but do they actually then make the decision to go because of this, and at what stage do they make that decision?
One idea at the AMA day was to communicate your offer purely through social media (e.g. twitter), no other channels - and then assess who turns up. Although I'm not a print-precious marketer (although still very partial to a spot of foil blocking), I'm not sure I'm even ready to take that risk just yet. It would be a great experiment though wouldn't it?
We'll be talking about the impact of social media at Contact, Manchester on Tuesday 9th February at the next Northwest AMA Members networking meeting. £5. All welcome (including non-members). Contact me for more information.
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