How 28 moustaches resulted in over 300 likes, 300 shares and 120 tweets
Movember (the month formally known as November) is a moustache-growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health. A few of the blokes at the Europeana office (including me) are joining the cause through the sprouting of our moustaches during the month of November.
Image from the French National Library – 1912 – Public Domain
Every day we’re working to initiate the re-use of Europeana content in creative ways that engage users outside the portal, particularly on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media platforms. Ultimately we want to ignite ideas within the network and share our experiences and results that can hopefully be applied to your own project or organisation.
So when this year’s Movember launched on 1 November and spread like wildfire through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, quickly becoming a trending topic, we saw an opportunity to join the cause and dig through Europeana to select some dashing examples of moustaches throughout history. Jumping into an active discussion such as Movember opened up Europeana to a receptive audience and enabled us to easily engage them with the subject/event from a historical context.
Throw your collections into the discussion
It quickly became clear that Europeana is not lacking content related to moustaches and we wanted to bring a small selection of them to the Movember movement. We pin-pointed some of the finest examples of facial hair from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thanks to public domain content from our partners at the French National Library and the Archivo de la Imagen de Castilla La Mancha.
Our historical moustaches Facebook gallery
The small amount of time invested in curating two collections resulted in our gallery of 28 images generating more than 120 tweets, 300 likes and 300 shares on Facebook – not to mention countless impressions thanks to the gallery being republished on websites such as Retronaut, one of the biggest websites for amateur historians. The collection was also posted on the official Movember Facebook accounts of Germany and Switzerland amongst others.
So the moral of the story is, spending a little time curating your collections to focus on a hot topic opens them up to a wide audience for discussion online. Check out some of the great reactions that we saw on Twitter as a result of our gallery.
@awessendorf - Some fine retro moustache action to inspire Movember participants
@tct_culturetrip - #movember, if you need some inspiration check out these photos of historical moustaches
@amamro - Some Movember inspiration for all you moustache growers
What we’ve learnt and what you can do
- Jump onto trending topics and curate your collections around them.
- Provide context and play with humour.
- Take your collections out of your space and host them on social networks such as Pinterest and Facebook, that way they’ll spread easily.
- Have fun and record the feedback, you never know when it’ll come in handy.