National Museum of American History

Although the federal government shutdown has started, the Smithsonian museums will remain open at least through Monday, October 6. Despite the media’s attention on 12:01 am on October 1, shutdowns don’t happen immediately because stopping a huge bureaucracy takes time, plus each agency has to determine who will be furloughed and who is essential—that’s why air traffic controllers keep working at airports but not educators at museums. Secondly, agencies can use private funds to continue operating, which is why the Smithsonian can keep the doors open a few more days.

I was fortunate to visit the National Museum of American History on September 30 with my “Interpreting Historic Sites and House Museums” course at George Washington University. For a couple of hours, my students analyzed the interpretation in two exhibitions that included historic buildings: Food (featuring Julia Child’s kitchen) and Within These Walls (featuring the 1750s Ipswich House, the largest object in the collection). They did a terrific job uncovering topics and themes, discussing how women are represented, and the assessing the use of objects.

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With the new year on the horizon, I’ve been evaluating my projects from the last year to determine how I can help historic places better connect to their audiences. For the past two years, I’ve used Twitter to share news about history, historic sites, historic preservation, and history museums. Each morning I scan the New York Times and other newspapers for stories, aiming to tweet about three stories daily to my @maxvanbalgooy account so that my followers can quickly learn what’s happening. The result? I have created 4,180 tweets and attracted nearly 500 Followers since I joined Twitter in June 2009. This blog, on the other hand, has 1000 subscribers, so it seems my time is better spent on my blog than Twitter. It could be very different for you, but how do we decide if Twitter is effectively engaging your audiences?

A useful place to start is with the metrics that Twitter provides: Followers and Likes. Likes are a low level of engagement because they only require that readers support a specific tweet or find it especially useful or enjoyable—but that’s it. Followers are a mid-level form of engagement because it means that a reader wants to engage with you and read everything that you tweet (“read” is probably overstating things; “scan” is more appropriate for Twitter). Retweets engage at a high level because your Followers share your tweet to their Followers (did you follow that? it’s about the impact of the multiplier effect)—unfortunately, there’s no easy way to measure Retweets (but boy, we would have more impact if we promoted Retweeting instead of Liking).

To better understand how effectively Twitter can engage audiences, I collected statistics for a variety of major history organizations to measure Tweets, Followers, and Likes as of today (December 8, 2016) to develop the following chart: Continue reading →