Why should heritage centres use social media?

A post from David and Gemma at The National Brewery Centre

Using social media for your heritage attraction is a key way to reach a wider audience, create awareness for your product and most importantly engage with your customer base
It’s a great way of reaching your followers promptly as well as their friends & followers! Your post can be shared and discussed and therefore reaches new audiences
A third of internet users consider their phone as their most important device for accessing the internet. It’s portable and always to hand. Over 90% of what you post on social media is read on mobile devices meaning people have the information to hand instantly
Social media finds your audience instead of them trying to find you

Top tips for using social media:

It’s short and to the point – research shows humans have an attention span of only 8 seconds. As a result we tend to skim over what we read. A short description or picture is more effective
Ensure everything you share is useful and to the point. Be short and snappy
Mix your content up, some business related but also add in stories about staff, volunteers and current projects to build a story and invite your customers in
Use shareable content like links, videos etc. When your audience shares something, they are effectively marketing on your behalf. Visual marketing increases re-tweets by upwards of 150%
Sound as human as possible. People do not wish to read promotions that sound like droning adverts
Keep your audience in mind and make your post appeal to them
Deliver the right amount of posts. Be consistent enough to be in the public’s mind however do not bombard or overwhelm them to the point that they get bored and un-follow you
Use scheduling tools such as Hootsuite to programme posts for the week or month. This way you know you have different posts being sent at different times, consistently without too much receptiveness or overlap. This also will help by hitting multiple time zones. Different people will have habits of checking phones at different times
Be brief and catchy – adding shrinked links for more information and implement competitions to enable you to gain likes and followers. Social media is a good tool however you do need to create an audience for you to be able to reach them. Competitions that require sharing your page allows you to increase followers whilst still offering something to your customers
Use tags and hashtags to link in other people and words which may reach further like-minded audiences
Explore paid advertising through facebook for accelerated awareness for a specific event. We have found costs to be generally lower than other platforms yet very powerful in creating awareness. Whilst it’s hard to quantify when we have done a marketing campaign for a specific event at The National Brewery Centre we have always seen an uplift in our other events as everything we do drives them to the website where we get to whet their appetite on all the events we have to offer
Having an active presence on social media over the last 24 months has really proved to be beneficial to The National Brewery Centre. It has enabled us to promote our events quickly & economically and we can reach additional audiences that may otherwise have not made the conscious decision to look at our flyers or website. It has also proved to be a good tool after the event. Audio clips of an event can show an audience what they have missed out on and drive them to book for a following event

You can follow the National Brewery Centre on Twitter and Facebook.