Evaluating museum visitor engagement via social media
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This document discusses evaluating social media engagement for visitor outreach. It recommends determining key objectives and metrics for success when planning a social media campaign. Lower effort activities like sharing digital collections online have medium potential for return, while higher effort goals like building a community have low potential to demonstrate clear ROI. The document provides tips for finding relevant audiences, monitoring engagement metrics from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and evaluating campaign outcomes based on resonance.
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Evaluating museum visitor engagement via social media
- 1. Evaluating visitor engagement via social media Dave Gerrard Loughborough University 1 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 2. What is this talk about? • Measuring “return” on social media “investment” • Planning a social media campaign • Finding an audience • Considering relevance • Monitoring the campaign outcomes • Considering resonance See Social Media's Critical Path: Relevance to Resonance to Significance Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/07/social-medias-critical-path-re/ 2 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 3. Social media: “return” on “investment” Objective you’re trying to achieve * Effort required ** Ease of monitoring Potential to judge ‘ROI’ Raise general awareness of museum Very low Very easy Very low Show people digital objects Low Easy Medium Easy High (once objects digitised) Open a new feedback channel Medium (if feedback-handling process in place) More specific event / exhibition marketing Medium Medium High Interact with visitors about content High Difficult Low Build a community Very high Very difficult Low * ** 3 From Let’s Get Real 2 - http://weareculture24.org.uk/projects/action-research/ “Effort” for someone familiar with social media. “Investment” (usually) = “effort”… 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 4. Really simple (and free) evaluation 4 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 5. Really simple (and free) evaluation 5 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 6. Really simple (and free) evaluation 6 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 7. Golden rule of evaluation Work out how you are going to evaluate an activity while you are planning the activity 7 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 8. Marketing an event / exhibition Potential key terms: information management, information strategy, information value 8 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 9. Find your audience and see what they do 9 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 10. Find your audience and see what they do 10 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 11. Find your audience and see what they do 11 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 12. Find your audience and see what they do 12 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 13. Look for relevant conversations • Relevance: • Listen to conversations • Pick out key words • Use them in your promotion • It‟s not about „going viral‟: • Thoughtfulness, value, empathy • Don‟t ask someone to promote you outright • Follow them if they interest you 13 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 14. Schedule relevant messages 14 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 15. Schedule relevant messages 15 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 16. Schedule relevant messages 16 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 17. Measure resonance “The speed and degree at which social objects change hands” 17 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 18. Monitoring your promotion with Facebook 18 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 19. Monitoring your promotion with Twitter 19 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 20. Picking an “event” hashtag 20 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
- 21. Summary • Measuring “return” on social media “investment” • Decide what your core strategy is • Perhaps plan a small campaign first? • Tie the campaign to an event • Find your audience • Discover what is relevant to your audience • Monitoring the campaign outcomes • Monitor what resonates • Before, during and (not too long) after 21 18/12/2013 d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk - @EpiphanyLboro
Notas del editor
- Perhaps the most important point of the whole talk, indeed the whole morning, is how vital it is to define what the terms “investment” and “return” are. This will be covered in detail on the next slide.Once those terms have been defined, the next steps are to find out who the audience that you’re aiming your social media promotion at are, and to try and get a sense of what kind of content will appear relevant to them. Then you can plan how to check which of your social media communications are resonating with them.(You should aim to do all three of these activities in parallel and iteratively, as you go along, rather than sequentially).The terms “relevance” and “resonance” are heavily-used social media buzzwords that seem to come from “Social Media's Critical Path: Relevance to Resonance to Significance”, a Harvard Business Review bloghttp://blogs.hbr.org/2010/07/social-medias-critical-path-re/ (though they may have been in use before then).
- This slide tabularises typical social media objectives as commonly found in the museum sector. The list of objectives comes from Elena Villaespesa’s paper in the back of the second phase report for the Let’s Get Real project, available at: http://weareculture24.org.uk/projects/action-research/. (Note – there are two Let’s Get Real reports – this is from the second one, but the first one is very helpful, too). Picking or adapting what your objective for using social media is effectively defines the type of “return” you are trying to achieve.As regards “investment”: many of the tools shown through the rest of the report (e.g. Hootsuite) are effectively free for “limited” use (though “limited” is often still useful enough to get value from). Therefore, the principle “investment” you’ll have to make is time. However – how much time depends upon how much of a “digital native” you are. If you’ve grown up in a world where the Internet has always existed, you’re a heavy user of social media in your personal life, and your smart-phone is always buzzing with Facebook and / or Twitter updates, then your “investment” of effort will generally be (or at least feel) low. If it’s all alien to you, then the “investment” required will be higher.This slide is written from my perspective, and I’m (mostly) in the former camp (I have a smart-phone that I rarely put down, thanks to Twitter). As a result, the estimates of effort in the second column are for a confident, “digital native” who is a pretty heavy user of social media in his personal life. To that end, setting up a Twitter profile and a Facebook page for an organisation is the work of hours at most, and then odd ten minute slots during each day (usually using a phone) to keep an eye on them, and if all you want to do is “raise general awareness of your museum” with social media, without getting any more specific than that, or worrying about quantifying the impact upon your museum of doing so in real terms, then not much more effort than that may be required. The final column, however, is the “so what” column… I added that to try and illustrate the potential difficulty of tying back the “social media objective” to genuine, measurable benefits to your museum. So, for instance, “raising general awareness of your museum” via social media, while relatively easy for a digital native to do, has a very low potential for being tied back to increased numbers of visitors, or an increased impact upon society overall. Similarly, “building a social media community” or “interacting with visitors about content” are also quite hard to judge the “real” benefit of. Note – I’m not saying that they’re not beneficial, I’m saying that it’s hard to measure the benefit – you have to take a bit of a leap of faith that these are positive things to do if you don’t want to go through the extra work of evaluating impact, and you will perhaps never be entirely sure whether the effort is worth it. How willing you may be to take that leap probably depends upon how much effort you think you’re going to find the task, too, so if you’re a confident digital native, you may be more willing to leap than if it’s all going to feel a bit of a drag. Note 2 – there is nothing wrong with being in the second camp. It would be more of a mistake to try and force yourself to promote something with social media if you’re not comfortable doing so, and you are going to become frustrated at the time and effort it is taking to wrestle with it all. It would be far better to direct efforts to a promotional campaign using media that you feel more comfortable with, as “forced” social media is pretty obvious to the “natives” and can sometimes go wrong, or simply just be ignored. One potential way forward under such circumstances might be to try and find a volunteer “digital native”, who feels more comfortable in the social world, and delegate to them?So the key recommendation from this slide is that, if you want to give social media a try (on your own or with a volunteer), but you don’t want to make a complete “leap of faith”, you should consider using it to promote something smaller than “the entirety your museum” – like “a specific event at your museum”. Promoting a smaller, one off event is what most of the rest of the presentation is about.
- Before we move onto a specific method of promoting an event and evaluating such promotion activity, as a quick aside, here are a few examples of how to evaluate how “general awareness” of a museum might be increasing via Social Media. The page above shows a page from the Reports section of the website Hootsuite: https://hootsuite.com/ - which is free for a low level of usage. Once you have set up a Hootsuite account, you can use its reporting functions to monitor simple aspects of a Twitter account, such as how many followers you have, and how many people have clicked on links you have Tweeted (which can show how effectively promotion via Twitter is driving traffic back to your website). As mentioned – this is free, and takes about 15 minutes (for a “digital native”) to set up.You can do a lot more with Hootsuite (including seeing a lot more reports), but you have to pay (the entry-level amount being around £7 per month per person). Perhaps the main reason people use Hootsuite is for scheduling posts onto both Twitter and Facebook, which is also free. (More about this later).
- In a similar vein, this page shows one of the built in evaluation tools that comes with a Facebook Fan Page, a set of tools known as Facebook Insights. This is one several reports you get for free – showing the number of visits to the page over time - once you have over 30 “Fans” “Liking” your page.This also shows how easy it is to evaluate how effective a campaign of “raising general awareness of your museum” using social media is.
- This is another of the built-in Facebook Insights pages – showing the demographics (age, sex and location) of the people that viewed your page. Note – while demographic information is never entirely accurate in social media (or indeed, in any survey) – it’s generally more accurate for Facebook than Twitter. Facebook “knows” a lot more about its users as you are encouraged to tell it about yourself when you setup an account.Facebook uses this knowledge of its users to provide an “all of Facebook” demographic (underlayed in light grey behind “your” demographics), to show how much your visitors differ from the “Facebook norm”.
- This slide is self-evident, really. Generally speaking, all evaluation is better than none, so if it’s bolted on as an afterthought, it’s still better than not doing it. But it’s rare to bolt it on at the end without ruing all the missed opportunities to have done it better, if only we had thought about evaluation when we were planning. A good example is wishing we had asked everyone where they had heard about our event, during the event, when we had them all in one place… Considering evaluation explicitly during the design of the event, and its promotion, helps you avoid “what might have beens” like this.
- This slide shows a (non-museum based) example of an event that requires promotion. (It’s a web page advertising the – fortunately very well attended – launch event for the research centre I work at – the Centre for Information Management in the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University).To start to consider how to promote an event such as this via social media, I would first extract a small set of key phrases that sum up the core topics of the event. This slide shows three – “information management”, “information strategy” and “information value”. “Information strategy” is highlighted as, of the three, that’s the one that worked best in the next step of the process – finding out what is “relevant” to individuals who are interested in “information strategy”.
- So a good first step towards finding an audience and what might be relevant to them is to search existing social media for the key phrases that relate to your event. While both Twitter, Facebook and (of course) Google have search engines you can use, another tool you can consider is FollowerWonk (www.followerwonk.com).FollowerWonk allows you to search for key terms that people have put in their Twitter Biographies (the short description of yourself that you can add and edit when you setup a Twitter profile). Searching for a phrase related to your event in FollowerWonk’s “Twitter Bios” search will therefore point you towards Twitter users who care so much about the topic of your event that they have used it to describe themselves on their own home Twitter timeline.The screenshot here shows a search for “Information Strategy” (one of the key terms from our launch event) being made in FollowerWonk’s Twitter Bio search. Once the search results are returned, you can also order them by what FollowerWonk call the “Social Authority” of the Twitter users in the list. This “Social Authority” score is generated by considering not only the number of Twitter followers a profile has, but also how regular that profile Tweets, how often it Tweets links to other pages, and how often it Retweets things from the profiles they, in-turn, follow. This method attempts to find profiles that are more influential and more likely to share information, not just those with lots of followers.The third result in the list looked like an interesting person when it comes to the topic of “information strategy”, so I conducted more analysis upon that profile…
- ... Clicking on the name of a profile in a list of FollowerWonk Twitter Bio search results takes you to the Twitter home timeline page of that profile. The purpose of finding relevant profiles is to start to look at what they are talking about, and the language that they use. Are they involved in conversations that are relevant to the topics covered by your event? Who are they having those conversations with? What type of key words and phrases are they using to describe relevant topics? Are there any #hashtags that they use alongside their messages about relevant topics, to add their ideas to bigger conversations? (If you find a hashtag in Twitter, clicking on it automatically conducts a search for it, so you can see where else it has been used and by whom).Also, very often, people or organisations will put a link to their blogs or web pages in their biography, too, which often provide a similar, but more in-depth, source of relevant content and discussion.In this instance, I got a warm feeling that I’d found someone relevant to the topics covered by the launch of the Centre for Information Management by using this technique, as I could see that both the Director and Deputy Director of the Centre followed this profile – in other words, the profile overlapped strongly with my own network. This reassured me that others in the FollowerWonk results list for that topic were likely to be relevant, too.
- Once you have found a profile that you consider to be relevant to a theme of your topic, you can also conduct another search with FollowerWonk to analyse both the followers of that profile, and the profiles that person / organisation follows in turn. This is a very quick and easy way to find further relevant profiles, particularly as the results are broken-down by FollowerWonk’s Social Authority score once again.(Note: when using FollowerWonk for free, the search will only work when the result set is smaller than 2000. The initial FollowerWonk biography search provides this information).
- This shot shows how you can drill down into segments of profiles from FollowerWonk reports. As before, clicking each profile’s name takes you to their home timeline of that profile, so you can start to analyse what they are talking about, with whom, and the language and phrases they use.
- So to sum up the work so far: to try and find relevant conversations currently occurring about your event, search for a key phrase related to your event (either in Twitter, Facebook or Google, or by using a social media analysis tool like FollowerWonk), then use the profiles you find to:“Listen” to the relevant conversations people are having.Pick out key words, phrases and #hashtags people use.Use these words and phrases to think about how to describe your event in a fashion that’s relevant to existing, current conversations.When starting to map these terms back onto your promotion for your event, try and dispel thoughts of “making your promotion go viral” as this may cause you to twist what you’re trying to say about the event a bit out of shape. Instead, consider what you’re doing to be “providing a relevant point of view to a conversation”. If that feels hard, then perhaps the conversations you have found might not be quite as relevant as you thought, in which case, keep looking, or start the whole process again with another Twitter Bio search using a different key phrase about your event.Out and out asking someone who appears to be an influential Twitter or Facebook user on a topic related to your promotion to “help you promote your event” is likely to be a waste of time, as their influential position generally means that others will be doing the same, and they will be likely to ignore you (much as they would ignore spam email). Indeed, why should they help you? What have you ever done for them?A far better approach, if their conversations are really relevant to your organisation, is to follow them, and then respond to their Tweets etc when you have some worthwhile insight to provide. This increases the likelihood that they will follow you in turn, and one day start promoting your organisation and events naturally. Give them the value of your expertise, as you would a visitor to your museum who is interested in an exhibit, and they may pay you back in kind one day.
- All of the analysis of existing conversations on the social network relating to your event needs to be tied back to the purpose of promoting your event, of course. In order to do so (and to avoid drifting off, fascinated, into the network), I would recommend that you start to create the messages you will use to promote your event in parallel with the work of analysing existing content. In other words, as soon as you find something that you can link back to something that’s happening in your event, use the connection you’ve made to inspire you to write a message (a Tweet or a Facebook post) about the event.Note: be sure and add a “unique” (or at least “unique enough”) event hashtag to as many of the messages you schedule as you can (preferably all of them). (There’s much more on this topic in a later slide).Using Hootsuite (or one of many other free Social Media management tools) you can schedule these messages to be sent way in advance of the date you want them to go out, so it’s possible to sit, plan and create messages for most of a promotional campaign in one go, at a time way ahead of the event itself. You should also plan the structure of how you will promote the event during, and after (winding down from it) at this point, too.Note: scheduling your whole promotion up front and just letting it run without monitoring what happens, while perhaps better than working in a completely ad-hoc, unplanned way, is not the best way of working, however. Time and resource constraints often make this the only viable option, of course, but it’s better, if at all possible, to monitor reaction to posts as they go out, react to those that really need an instant response, and use the feedback you receive to adjust those still scheduled to be sent. There will be more about this later. By and large, having a planned event promotion schedule (mostly) worked out up-front, that you then tweak and adjust as it runs, is a good approach.
- You can also use FollowerWonk (and a similar tool in Facebook Insights) to check when the busiest times of day for your followers to use Twitter and Facebook are, to ensure you schedule messages at times of day where they’re likely to appear near the top of your followers’ timelines.
- One tool that provides an interesting message scheduling service for teams to use is called Measured Voice. (It’s not free – it starts at $15 per month for two people – but there is a 30 day trial to help you evaluate it). The thing that makes Measured Voice stand out is that allows you to load the vocabulary of relevant terms etc (that you can find by analysing influential profiles) into the system. This then helps prompt team members to write messages in a consistent, relevant way.I shall hopefully evaluate this tool in more depth over the next few weeks (I want to do something ‘for real’ with it) and shall report back.
- In terms of evaluating how successfully your promotion might be working, one of the key terms people use when considering the impact of social media posts is “resonance”. (The definition on this slide comes from the Harvard Business Review article mentioned earlier: http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/07/social-medias-critical-path-re/)Two aspects of “resonance” are often discussed – reach: (how far the message has ‘travelled’ through the network – namely how many people may have seen it) and engagement: how many people have responded to it in some way by commenting or replying to it.If at all possible, resonance should be evaluated before, during and after the event. Also, it’s important not to forget older methods of assessing the impact of promotional activity that are still just as valid now social media is here, such as adding a simple “how did you hear about this?” question to printed evaluation forms. Be sure and add “social media” (or even, if possible, “Facebook” and “Twitter” as separate choices) to that form, of course.
- Facebook Insights has built-in tools that help you find out the reach and engagement for every message you send out, which allows you to see which ones have content that people have responded to. It’s worth remembering that luck plays a part in this, though (one of your messages being shared by someone with lots of friends will automatically boost its reach), so it’s best not to make drastic changes to a promotion schedule based on the popularity of one particular message. If patterns of “popularity” (or at least, “topics that strike a chord”) start to become evident around particular messages with similar themes, then it might be worth emphasising that theme by adding a couple of extra messages about it to the messaging schedule, however.
- Finding the same type of ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’ measurements for Tweets is a little harder (unless you want to start paying to unlock features of various tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social). The free level of Hootsuitewill show you how often a message has been Retweeted, however, which is the same concept as ‘sharing’ in Facebook. To see the response to a message, you can view it in Hootsuite or plain Twitter and track the conversation around it that way.
- The other way to use Twitter to see how much your promotional activity for a specific event or exhibit might be “resonating” is to give that event a specific (and if possible, completely unique) hashtag. You can then search for this hashtag before, during and after the event to see who has used it, and what they have said, hence using a unique one being important for this purpose. (Note: make sure to select All above the results when you search, to see everyone that’s used it).If you get a decent set of responses from attendees that all use the event hashtag, this one search for that tag after the event can provide a quick-to-gather, but surprisingly in-depth and revealing set of event evaluation data. (It’s kind of like a comments book for the event, but one that allows commenters to talk to and respond to each other).When looking for an event hashtag to use, always check how unique you proposed hashtag might be by searching for it with the Twitter search before you start using it. In this case, we chose the hashtag #CIMLaunch for our Centre for Information Management launch, but it was about the fourth or fifth one we tried. Even then, it wasn’t entirely unique, as people had used it several years before, but it had been dormant for long enough for us to filter out any confusing Tweets that had used it previously.Another thing to ensure is that, once you’ve found a suitable hashtag, start using it ASAP – as this will reduce the risk of others picking the same one in the meantime. (If they are sensible and check that it’s not being used first, they will find yours). Then add it to as many (preferably all) messages that you schedule to send out, preferably both in Twitter and Facebook. Another trade-off with choosing a hashtag is that you need it to be easy for other Twitter users who are interested in attending your event to use in their own posts. Attendees may want to add it to their Tweets during the event, too. This is why we chose #CIMLaunch and not #CentreForInformationManagementLaunch for our event. If it’s used ‘during’ the event, it will usually be entered by phone – so keep complicated typing to a minimum if you can by incorporating real words, not complex sets of initials.It almost goes without saying that you should try and publicise the hashtag on any other promotional material (posters, leaflets, pages on your website) that you use for the event if at all possible, notwithstanding complicated printing of promotional material that might need to happen way beforehand... If you’re in a situation where you’re getting complicated, large and expensive print runs done way before the event, then there’s always a risk someone else, in all good faith, could start using the hashtag that you’ve had printed on your leaflets inbetween getting them printed and starting your social media promotional campaign in earnest, as there’s no “reservation system” for hashtags. Hence start using your event hashtag within Twitter and Facebook as soon as you choose it. Also, print it and put it in prominent places during the event for people to use while they are there, of course.
- So this summarises the talk. To list a few extra important things worth mentioning:Social Media seems easy for those of us in the “Digital Native” generation but the effort involved tends to be (or at least feel) greater for people who don’t use social media in their daily lives. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but of course you need to consider the effort when planning, as this effort is the primary “investment” you will have to judge your return against.Scoping your use of social media down to “promotion of a specific event” from “promotion of my entire museum” is one way to deal with the risk of over-stretching. What you may find, however, is that promoting three or four events in turn may cause a bigger “social network” for your organisation to come about naturally, particularly if you use the technique of “finding relevant profiles”, following them, and interacting with them, described here.Perhaps most importantly, however – social media works best if it’s natural, so thinking of using social media as interacting with, and hopefully building relationships with, people that want to support your museum and its events, rather than “promoting an event at an audience” is more likely to lead to success. The same degree of courtesy, friendliness and, in some cases, professional candour with expert visitors, that you would expect to apply when representing your organisation “in the flesh” are, of course, appropriate.Finally: once your event is over, and the social media chatter about the event dies down (which can take a few weeks), you’ll perhaps want to capture information from Twitter and Facebook to provide evidence of impact in the event evaluation process. Note that social media (and Twitter in particular) is very immediate and hence there are no guarantees that all the “stuff” will still be available for you to capture months after the fact. So don’t let too many weeks pass after the event before recording the ‘buzz’ – much of it may have gone when you come to look for it.