Museum Analytics - British Museum vs. Brooklyn Museum

In looking for two museums to study for a quick post on two museums using social media, I first visited the Museum Analytics site. I've used this as a tool before, especially Martha's class Cultural Heritage Informatics. That said, the site is really just numbers...it's when you start digging that it gets interesting.

That said, I decided to look at the British Museum first. You can check out their current stats on the site here. As of this morning, the site indicates that their facebook site has 678,753 likes, 26 posts from October 19-October 25th, and 616 comments during that period. On Twitter, the British Museum has 467,673 followers. Museum Anayltics also looks at which posts garnered the most engagement, based # of likes and comments. During this period there was a timeline post on facebook featuring a freehand drawing by architect Christopher Wren with an explanatory, biographical caption. This post had 5083 likes and 25 comments alone. What's nice to see is that the British Museum encouraged engagement by responding to queries posted by followers in the comments. Here the British Museum is practicing something called "social care" where they encourage and develop a dialogue with their online audience. For great explanation on "social care" and why this is important to cultural heritage institutions, check out this great site: Colleen Dilenschneider's Know Your Own Bone.

Where does the British Museum stand against other museums worldwide? According to Museum Analytics, the British Museum ranks:

• Facebook #5 - (behind MOMA, Royal Collection Trust, Museum of Islamic Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Twitter #6 - (MOMA, London’s Design Museum, Guggenheim, Royal Collection Trust, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Website -  #1 with 5,8421,238 visitors

I couldn't find a "Social Media Strategy" online for the British Museum, but did find their Social Media Code of Conduct on their website (how very civilized of them!). Their code of conduct does offer a mission statement, of sorts, for social media, if not detailing how they plan to implement it within the institution:

As a museum of the world, for the world, the British Museum wants to engage with a global public. Our social media presence is focused on helping people find out more about, discuss and engage with the Museum’s collection, public programme and research. It is intended to encourage cross-cultural understanding, storytelling and inclusive, lively debate. 

In addition to listing their house rules, their social media platforms are listed: Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Sound Cloud and Spotify.

Although I couldn't find an internal document regarding expectations of the staff in terms of maintaining or contributing to social media, you can see some of the folks involved by visiting/following their blog. Blog posts from the beginning of summer were written by an exhibition project officer, two conservators and PhD students and are fairly in-depth articles that include images of research, exhibition projects in the works and also provide a platform for exploring museum artifacts in more depth. Nice reading!

The second museum I looked at is the Brooklyn Museum.  We touched upon this in an earlier class, but the Brooklyn Museum has made a reversal of sorts in it's approach to the use of social media. A 2014 article in the New York Times discusses the Brooklyn Museum's change in strategy and audience focus. After analyzing who was visiting and engaging with museum on it's various social media platforms, the Brooklyn Museum made a move that caught the attention of the museum world: it "shuttered" many of it's social media platforms to focus outreach to their local, target audience. Check out the responses on this page, most notably the response by Shelly Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement and Technology at the Brooklyn Museum: 

There’s no one shot solution for this kind of measurement. For us, we take a lot of factors into consideration including what we think of the “heartbeat” – that very unquantitative feeling we have when continually managing the account over time. If you do this day to day you can feel the ebb and flow of a platform and its engagement or lack of it. The thing to take away here is that our goals changed. While we do look at metrics and base decisions on that as one factor, with our audience goals (who we are trying to engage) changing the platforms we were using or needed to stop using became clear. I would always start with audience goals before looking at anything else and I would say that was 75% of the decision here. I hope that puts some of this in perspective.

So they left Flickr, HistoryPin, iTunes, and Foursquare and, at that time, would love to leave facebook but did not. In addition to facebook, the Brooklyn Museum is using Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter. The stats according to Museum Analytics for the period of October 19-25th, 2015:

• Facebook: 161, 539 page likes, 5 posts and 19 comments
• Twitter; 529, 923 followers

Their most recent facebook post garnering high traffic was a link an article on the Wall Street Journal about their two newest trustees, with 293 likes and 9 comments.

What I would to find out is if their change in social media strategy has been successful in finding and reaching out to their target audience. New members? Increased local engagement? A follow up article would be fascinating!