The Museum of English Rural Life Leads Museum Social Media Duck Hunt

The Museum of English Rural Life has a well placed reputation for masterfully using social media to draw attention to it’s collection with witty tweets.

Last year a picture that they posted of an Exmoor Horn ram attracted over 60,000 likes and more than 18,000 retweets.

On that occasion the museum added an astonishing 7,000 followers in 24 hours.

This week they once again showed their skill with social media with a series of duck related tweets. It started with a picture of a duckling.

This was followed by a challenge to the British Museum to ‘give us your best duck’.

Other institutions took the opportunity to get in on the fun and share items from their own collections.

The conversation soon jumped the Atlantic to attract the attention of American Museums.

But not every museum had something appropriate to share.

But the Museum of English Rural Life had one more card up it’s sleeve.

Adam Koszary, the man responsible for the Museum of English Rural Life Twitter account told Creative Review in a recent interview about his work, ‘I always start from the assumption that everyone finds everything in our museum really boring, but we know that it isn’t,” he explains. “You need to work really hard to get over that initial impression. Rural life connects across food, cultural history, national identity, and many other things which people find interesting, but they assume it’s all about cows’. 

‘I come from a collections background, but I see social media as the most effective way of reaching the most people with the stories we can tell about history. I see it as something museums should be doing as their core work. It’s as important as having physical galleries.’

You can follow The Museum of English Rural Life Twitter account here. Interested in learning social media best practice for museums? Start here.