FYI - the WW&F Railway Museum is now on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wwfrailway Please follow us, if you're on Twitter.

We're also on Facebook as well: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wiscasset-Waterville-and-Farmington-Railway-Museum/147279126870(been on FB for quite a while). In the last month a number of postings have been made regarding Locomotive 9's restoration work, as well as happenings at the Museum. Please check it out and Like us.

Whether you like social media or not, it's here to stay for a while, is used considerably by the younger generation, and marketing on these platforms should be considered a sizeable percentage of your marketing effort. I say "effort" because while you don't have to pay money to market yourself, you have to do the work to keep things up to date and current, as well as make posts about future events. We're lucky we have a couple who appear to be having a lot of fun at it.

Interesting.

We are seeing the teens-30's (and older) crowd using Facebook, hand held devices etc. to the point where conversation at the end of a day at the local beanery consists of the old farts talking and the younger members glued to their i-whatevers.

The only thing with Twitter (as I understand it) is you need interesting feeds, often enough to capture the attention of your perceived audience.

If the feed is just for a "small circle of friends" as the late, really great Phil Ochs used to say, it probably is a waste of effort.

Hopefully the feed won't be a small circle of friends.

On Facebook we now have over 800 likes, and since our FB page is accessible by the public (ie, you don't have to logged in to Facebook to see it), an untold number of other viewers.

Have we been able to translate those 800 likes into butts in seats? Not that I've been able to tell, but the trouble with marketing is trying to find out where the best bang for your buck comes from. Last year's ticket sales were the best in several years....

Apparently the secret is also pictures, lots of them and interesting ones.