Folks,
I find it interesting that a whole new set of museum web pages is appearing on Facebook. They feature lots of still photos and videos.

For example, the arrival of the 1902 Barney & Smith sleeper [i]Duluth[i] was well covered. And now the construction of a new Car Shed to protect this jewel of wooden cars has been announced in 2017.

The 68 foot narrow gauge wooden turntable at the WW&F Ry Museum has been covered with almost weekly updates on the construction of the new facility.

The Colorado Railroad Museum has put up lots of new video; including some drone flights over their property!

i suggest signing up for Facebook and looking for you favorite railroad museum. I think you will like what you see there.

ted66

National Capital Trolley Museum
https://www.facebook.com/dctrolley/

The best place to get updates on the J&L 58 project is our Facebook page, mainly because I can take a photo and post it while I am on site. To post to a forum such as RYPN requires going home, resizing the pic and either creating a new thread or updating an existing one. Feedback also is not immediate. But on the downside Facebook is fleeting whereas Forums can be searched and stuff posted years ago can still be easily found.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/rolling.ingot/

Enjoy the Facebook sites of the Railroad Museum of Long Island:

https://www.facebook.com/railroadmuseumofli/?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/SteamUpLIRR39/?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/G16196465World ... n/?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/RMLI-Steam-Tea ... 4/?fref=ts

Stewartstown Railroad Company (York County, PA) has an active facebook page with updates on project progress (at least weekly) as well as operating schedule, events, and schedules for volunteer workdays and work weekends !!

Ahead of the Torch is a rather active page for front line historic preservationists.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/AOTTORCH/

Another good one for Alco (mostly diesel) Locomotive owners and operators:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/462093183911744/

It's very important to remember that "despite not everyone being on Facebook," it's critical to promote and archive your progress on your website for several reasons:

- it's difficult to track progress over time on social media - lots of milestones are easily missed and buried under new content and there's not an easy way (yet) to revisit past posts or search posts.

- new visitors, members and supporters should be able to easily access updated and relevant information on your website in the event they didn't discover it via social media first. You never want to tell a donor or customer "oh just try and find it on our Facebook page..."

- social media is not ideally optimized for search engines. If you get a new piece of equipment or are advertising a new operation, you have to have it accessible on your website. Don't over rely on social media.

- your website is your digital front door/home base/mothership and should be refreshed with content on an average basis, with social media pointing back to the mothership whenever possible. You want to mobilize support, not just garner "likes."

One major recommendation I can make is to take ten minutes at the end of each month and update your main website with what you've posted elsewhere -- since the words are there and images are already web-friendly/compressed, it should help expedite the effort.

One of my website is the railroad link directory at http://www.railroaddata.com/

I routinely go through and verify links and update them as needed. I am amazed by how many of the smaller museums and clubs are making their Facebook page the only page they have.

I understand the concept, it has far more traffic and it's extremely easy to update and add photos, so it's much more likely to get done. But I have to wonder how it affects your google rankings. I would suspect that stand alone page would rank higher, but I don't know that for certain.

On a side note, if your operation isn't listed on railroaddata.com, be sure and submit your link on the page. It's totally free, and we get lots of traffic, consistently ranking first or second for "railroad links" on Google.

Oh, and I'll add my usual helpful hint. No matter where you page is, be sure you have all the relevant info. Pretend you have never heard of your organization, and visit your website. Can you find the old "5 W's" Who, what, when, where and why?"

Where is especially problematic. You'd be amazed how many I find that say 'The museum is located at 271 West Main Street" but leave out the city, let alone the state! Mostly small groups, model railroad clubs and the like.

While I'm not a railroad museum - I do have a website and various social media pages - when you google "Big Jim Video Productions", my web pages come up in the following order:

1. Main webpage
2. YouTube
3. Facebook
4. Vimeo

My Twitter and Instagram feeds come down lower on the front page.

https://www.google.com/search?q=big+jim ... uctions%22

What will help your ranking is content - properly written, categorized, coded, tagged etc - and then referrers, which "boost" the mothership.

AND WHILE WE ARE ON THE TOPIC...

A few suggestions - probably worth another discussion entirely.

• DO NOT SAY "I" when posting as your page - use plural references and never singular. You are posting as an organization, not an individual. Your "voice" should be conversational, informative and concise. Unless you are attributing your post to a specific person or quoting someone, never, ever say "I."

• Draft posts to be reviewed by others. Spellcheck, grammar check, voice check, content check.

• Post items of interest and in interesting ways. Even if I really just want to link to people to particular content, I post an engaging photo. Naked links are bad and easily glossed over. Post well composed photos and videos. An organization this weekend posted blurry, dark photos and I couldn't understand why.

• Be professional and courteous at the same time.

• Help people help you! As an example, a client recently said "stay tuned to our website for more information on XYZ project" instead of "you can sign up at this link for our newsletter to be notified..."

Don't forget to check out the ATRRM Facebook page. There you'll see links to every new post of the Tourist Railroads & Railway Museums online magazine. Something new appears every 3.4 days on average, including numerous features.

Remember when everyone was complaining that RyPN doesn't have feature stories anymore? Well we have plenty on TRRM. Check us out at www.atrrm.org/blog, on Facebook or better yet, subscribe to receive new post alerts.

Aaron Isaacs, TRRM editor

With regards to Facebook pages:

There is a difference between official, sanctioned, controlled pages owned and operated directly by the museum/line's staff, and the "fan" pages that have popped up for certain museums, often "in lieu of" official pages--in some cases, because the "only ones" in the museum that understand Facebook at all are the "young guns," the sons of officers or regular volunteers, etc. The content of the latter is often aimed more at the membership or already-converted.

In many cases, one has to be wary of two aspects:
*An "official" page will often sound like it's written by an ad agency--because it often is, or at least paid marketers whose job it is to promote the latest upcoming Day Out With Thomas, Candy Cane Special, Steampunk Festival, Dinner Train, etc. or fundraising project--but they offer little to nothing about their history, locomotives, equipment, etc.
*an "unofficial" page often has lots of "railfan" content, but can also lack proper marketing, updates on coming events, etc., and at times runs the risk of highlighting or discussing things that may not even be prudent for public discussion (a minor derailment, a rules change, etc.).

Administration of a museum/line's official Facebook page may well be an excellent task to hand to one of two categories of members:
1) a young but knowledgeable member who may not be old or responsible enough to work in the shop, on the track gang, etc.;
2) a disabled, elderly or distant-living member who is still sharp as a tack and has access to the information, resources, photos and videos, etc. for lively, engaging, and accurate posts.

Add to the lists of museums with FB pages the RR Museum of Pa. (official), the B&O Railroad Museum (official), Tennessee Valley RR Museum (official), Arizona State RR Museum-Williams (semi-official), RR Museum of New England, West Va. RR Museum, Georgia State RR Museum-Savannah, Mad River & Nickel Plate, Arizona Railway Museum-Chandler, KRM, Northwest Ry. Museum-Snoqualmie, IRM, Monticello, Whippany.......

Some of us younger volunteers got together to start an official Illinois Railway Museum Steam Team Facebook page. Before doing so, we got permission from the curator of the department and the general manager of the museum. The main goal is to keep people interested in the department and what we are doing. And, in most cases, we post updates from the official website for viewers on social media to read as well.

It requires some thought to keep it going, though. We try to do "Throwback Thursday" posts on engines in the collection every week, along with a picture of whichever engine happens to be the subject of the post. A picture always accompanies these posts, which is, as previously noted, very important! Generally, we try to relate the stories of the collection to people in a way that gets them interested in our collection and what we're doing. If people are interested and stay interested, they're more likely to come see us in person or, perhaps, even volunteer or donate monetarily. But it's not one person doing everything. There are three admins on the Facebook page and we all communicate as to what goes up and what doesn't.

The advantage to having one of these pages is public outreach. People like knowing what's going on. If someone wants to donate money to an organization, they want to see that said organization is doing good things with what they have. A Facebook page, as trivial as it sounds, is one way people are checking in on not only other people, but organizations as well. Time and time again I've had people tell me, "Be careful what you post on social media! Employers are scrutinizing everything on there." The same can be said of charities (charitable trusts) and charitable people. If they go to your Facebook page and see a well maintained, positive chronicle of what's going on, they're more likely to offer financial assistance. On the flip side, a rather poorly maintained social media page can have the opposite effect.

But, I will admit I'm biased. I'm 23 and quite active on computers daily, and the other admins on the page are just about the same. For someone who isn't computer savvy and who doesn't know how to navigate the ocean that is social media, starting/maintaining one of these pages can be quite difficult.

One thing we've tried to do differently as well is keep the steam shop curator involved in the operation of the page, or at least aware of it. He's not a computer guy, at all, but he trusts us. The page is ours to run, of that there's no doubt, but we keep him involved where we can. Just this past Saturday I was picking his brain for some information on a few of the engines in the collection so we'd have plenty of ideas for our Throwback Thursday posts.

Anyway, that's my take on it and my experiences with it, for what its worth. Social media can be a great, cost effective tool promoting your organization and it's goals. But you get out of it what you put into it.

Christian Ellis