On lockdown: Metropolitan museum increases its social media followers by 165,000

Participants of #MetTwinning challenge recreate works from the Met’s collection. Source: Metmuseum/TAN

With 9.8 million followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the Metropolitan museum became the second most popular museum on social media after the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Art Newspaper reports.

The date were published in March 2020. The number of the Met’s followers on social media has since increased by 165,000 to almost 10 million.

“So much has changed in just a year,” says Claire Lanier, the Metropolitan Museum in New York’s social media manager. “There's been a big increase in terms of engagement. In the first two weeks of lockdown, we saw engagement go up by 95% on Instagram, by 64% on Twitter and by 17% on Facebook. Also of note, in the past nine weeks, impressions on Twitter have increased by 71.2% and on Instagram by almost 50%.”

Each department of the museum has it own account, with communications and social media teams curating their work.

“We advise and offer training and best practices. I know there's at least one account where the department head is the one who does all the posting because they’re really passionate about it while other departments share responsibility as a team. Each account has its own followers and that's actually what's really cool about it,” Lanier says.