Social Media at the Museum

Let me begin this blog post by encouraging you to check out our latest World Diabetes Day (WDD) Facebook event page here, where you can find out about Banting House’s event on November 14^th, 2019, which celebrates both WDD and Dr. Banting’s birthday!

These past few weeks at Banting House NHSC, I’ve been focused on giving WDD 2019 at Banting House a presence on social media, specifically on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Working with social media has been an important part of my time at Banting House so far, and I’m excited to share a little bit more about the process.

Creating the Facebook event page for WDD and Dr. Banting’s birthday was the first step to getting our event out onto social media. Event pages on Facebook not only provide visitors with the information they need to know about the event, but they also allow visitors to respond to the event to let us here at Banting House know if they are planning on attending. This is a really important step in the planning process, just like the creation of a critical path, which I mentioned last week. After creating the event page, the next step was to promote the page, and encourage people who planned on attending the event to click “going”. To promote the event, we wrote more Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts, which boast not only pictures from past WDD events, but also a historical “Dear Dr. Banting” letter, along with a reminder to check out our Facebook event page. The event and the posts seem to do really well on all types of social media, so stay tuned for more engaging posts promoting our event!

An important aspect of all of our social media posts is the numerous hashtags that we include. Usually, those hashtags can include, but are not limited to, #bantinghouse, #bantinghousenationalhistoricsite, #thisplacematters, #t1d, #t2d, #enddiabetes, #banting, #diabetes, #insulin, and #ldnont. Hashtags are basically key words, and they’re super important to include in posts, especially on sites like Instagram and Twitter. This is because when individuals search for topics that they are interested by using hashtags on these sites, our posts with the same hashtags will likely show up. This means that individuals who may be interested in Banting House can more easily find our posts and page. For example, the tag #ldnont, which stands for London, Ontario, is filled with posts related to events, people, and places in London, Ontario, including posts that we’ve written about Banting House!

Social media isn’t just great for promoting events like WDD, it’s also a great way to connect with other organizations and share some of the interesting artifacts in our collection that may not be on display in the museum! Just this week we were able to share a beautiful letter written by Dr. Banting’s wife Marion while they were on a holiday in Orleans, France in 1925. The stationary depicted the Restaurant Jeanne D’Arc on Place du Martroi, where Dr. Banting and Marion dined. We were curious to see what the building looked like today, and after some searching on social media, we were able to find the modern building and the restaurants that are there now. We even ended up tagging them in the posts to let them know that their building is a part of Banting House history!

Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so you can keep up with all of our new and exciting posts, especially leading up to the WDD and Dr. Banting’s Birthday celebrations!

This post was written by Jenna Philbrick, Graduate research Assistant at Banting House NHSC. Jenna is currently completing her M.A. in Public History at Western University.