History part 2 - Let there be Twitter

I've just scrolled back, because I can, to the first Tweet I made on Twitter on behalf of Fabrica. It was 4 April this year and I was in the gallery for a venue hire. In fact the first part of this post could probably read exactly the same as the post about Facebook with the two words switched over. To summarize and thereby save myself a couple of hundred words:-

-Thought Fabrica should have a Twitter feed
-Thought vaguely along the lines that it'd be for marketing
-Set up a personal Twitter account to get familiar with it*
-Realized push marketing angle was not that interesting
-Fell in love with Twitter

*Actually it turns out I already had a Twitter account, which I'd opened a year or so before and then promptly forgotten. It was only when I discovered that someone else had taken my name on Twitter and I was trying to think of an alternative that some dim and dusty memory was stirred and I remembered that I already had an account and the person that had taken my name was me. Since then I've come to love Twitter and use it a lot but when I first opened the account I didn't know what it was for and what it might mean to me. I suspect this is the case with a lot of people, you have to find your own way to it and your own value in it. This is on a personal level of course, for arts organisations I don't think there's any question of its value and I'm getting pretty evangelical about it.

Looking back over the early tweets it's clear from the outset that I was doing what I now believe is one of the key opportunities with all social media and that is giving some insight into the process, the 'behind the scenes' that people don't get to see. I'd like to say I was really clued up from the get go but the reality is, having started the feed, I didn't want it to just wither away and I was tweeting the only things I could think of given the lack of any events to 'market' at that time.

What I have always been focused on was the opportunity for dialogue with your audience, for feedback, and one of the early ideas I had, in fact looking back it was in the first few days, was a tweet review competition. It was a simple thing, see the show, tweet a review and the best would get posted on the website. I thought it was a great idea, still do, as did everyone I talked to about it. Throughout the Kapoor show I kept pushing it and at the end of it we had three entries. Discounting the one from a Fabrica director and the one from my partner, we had one entry. To be honest I don't really understand why. Perhaps, I thought, it was because the Kapoor show was a bit tricky, a bit difficult to engage with, but re-launching the idea with our current much more immediately accessible show has elicited no response at all, even with prizes on offer. I'm flummoxed but I'm not giving up so watch this space on that one.

That's all for now on Twitter, there's a lot more to come but I am vaguely trying to keep this in bite-sized chunks for all you busy busy people.

You can follow Fabrica on Twitter and/or me