Twitter campaigns have become an increasingly important aspect of any digital marketing strategy for businesses in order to create brand loyalty and awareness. In a business heavily reliant on donations to survive, museums creating awareness and interacting with consumers to create brand loyalty can have a large impact on the success of the business.

Here are five campaigns to take inspiration from:

#EmptyMet

In 2013, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art created the #EmptyMet campaign. This involved inviting popular instagrammers into the museum after hours to take pictures of the museum. This campaign was so successful it was used by other museums across the US and Europe.

The #EmptyMet campaign was so popular they’ve turned it into a guided tour open to members of the public.

#PowerUp

In July the Science Museum in London created the #PowerUp campaign to increase awareness of their video games event that was taking place over a period of two weeks.

The museum itself used videos and images from the event itself as well as links to their website to encourage more people to come along.

A number of people attending tweeted about the event too, with a feeling of nostalgia being a popular topic, as well as embracing of their nerdy side.

One aspect of the event was the photo opportunities. One of these was a Mortal Kombat background, which is set up perfectly for someone to replicate a scene from the game, before posting it on Twitter.

#HatTagMerl

In June the Museum of English Rural Life started the #HatTagMerl hashtag. This involved people either tweeting The MERL’s account pictures of themselves wearing an array of hats at the East Reading Festival or The MERL tweeting pictures of people taking part in this event.

The hashtag received twenty one tweets in the day that the East Reading Festival was running and with the way it performed, will be used again at future events.

#MuseumOfIceCream

The Museum of Ice Cream is opening July 28th in the Meatpacking district of New York, where you can go swimming in a pool of sprinkles (yes, sprinkles!). As you can see, the twitter account for the museum has only one tweet and one retweet, but the #MuseumOfIceCream has a number of independent blog posts and tweets spreading the word about the museum.

The success of this campaign is clear to see. Before the museum has even opened, tickets to visit have totally sold out, with many of the people tweeting on the hashtag expressing their disappointment in missing out on tickets and jealously of those who did.

#MaryRoseRevealed

The Mary Rose Museum has recently opened again after £5 million renovations to give visitors a better experience. The museum used the #MaryRoseRevealed in order to raise awareness.

A number of news sites reported on the recent opening using the hashtag, such as the BBC and the Telegraph Travel, which would have improved the reach of the campaign massively.

The part that stands out with these five campaigns is how involved members of the public have become with the hashtags. All five have received tweets from people attending events, independent blogs reviewing the events or local news articles making people aware of when and where the events are taking place.

It’s important to remember that there is not one standard way for a museum in particular, to create a twitter campaign and should be built around the specific audience. The targeted audience of the #MaryRoseRevealed was very different to that of the #MuseumOfIceCream for example, other than the geographical location.

With the school holidays now starting, it is a perfect opportunity for museums to make the most of Twitter and create a campaign which reaches parents who are looking for a way to entertain the children.