Well it’s now 8 weeks into my internship here at Banting House National Historic Site of Canada! Lots has happened during these 8 weeks and I definitely have learned a lot about the daily operations of a national historic site and museum.
In today’s post, I want to circle back to discussing social media. I mentioned my previous work as a social media manager in Navigating a Digital World. In this post I also discussed the importance of social media and a digital presence, especially during this pandemic. Last week I conducted another social media analysis to get some numbers from our socials for the month of June. The data that I pulled for the month, speaks to the importance of a digital presence for museums and historic sites, lets look at some numbers!
January 2020 to April/May 2020
The above graphic looks at the data from our website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Of course, one of the goals of social media is to continue to grow so that you can get your message out to more people. Overall, our most popular social media platform is Facebook, we get a lot of interaction with the community on our posts. But, I really wanted to get that same interaction on Twitter and Instagram, and while it’s certainly a large task, I was determined to accomplish it!
A great way to increase social media following is being consistent! While its ideal to post everyday, with a lack of funding and dedicated resources, social media often falls onto one person’s plate, and they have many other tasks they need to complete! An easy way to get around the burden remembering to post everyday is using a social media scheduling service like Hootsuite. You connect your platforms, plug in the info you want scheduled, and sit back and watch as the app posts for you!
Another important thing is to have content, you sort of need content to schedule! Luckily, this years marks the 100th anniversary of Dr. Banting being in London, so our timeline posts have been getting a lot of interaction across all our platforms. But, our Historic Places Day content seemed to get a lot of interaction too! I was smiling reading everyone’s favourite memories from their visits to Banting House NHS! We also got a lot of interaction from our Rekindle the Flame campaign and it was heartwarming to see our community come together to help on our journey to relighting the flame!
With all of this in mind, here is the most recent social media analysis and a comparison with the previous one:
I changed some of the measure to look at, just based off the data I had available and while the second image doesn’t look impressive right off the bat. When you look at it the first image is looking at about 3 to 4 months worth of data and the second image is looking at the past 28 days. Our interactions on some of our platforms is has almost reached the same level in 28 days as it did in 3 to 4 months. That is a big improvement!
Here is our following count for each platform, Instagram and Twitter didn’t give a percentage, but it’s still rather impressive! When I started my internship at Banting House NHS I believe our Instagram was at around 630 followers, so within the last month and a half we have gained almost 70 new followers. I hope as I finish up my internship here I can continue to help increase our social media presence!
This post was written by Kat MacDonald, an intern at Banting House NHSC. Kat is currently completing her M.A. in Public History at Western University.
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