BoW Title: One in a Million
Institution: Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar
Designer: MIA Online Team
URL: https://www.facebook.com/MIAQatar
Category: Social Media

Over the last two years, The Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) has expanded its social media offer across a range of platforms, developing a wide following across the MENA region and the world.

Whilst quoting numbers of followers or fans might be considered a crude measure, MIA finds itself, one of the more followed museums on Facebook and Google+, not far behind some of the major international museums, ranked 6th for Museums on Facebook (source: museum-analytics.org), and ranked 4th for Museums on Google+ (source: manual search and gplusdata.com). Interest based targeting has enabled us to build a large and loyal following. MIA has frequently participated in the international social media initiatives such as Museum Selfie Day and Ask a Curator.

The social media team is part of the Online Department, providing a regular calendar of joined up information, promotions and engagement, as stand-alone posts and also as content to drive traffic to the MIA website. Close liaison with staff from all MIA departments generates a diverse and interesting mix of museum-based content using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Google+ and Instagram.

Our most effective engagement for 2014/15 has been ‘Are You One in a Million‘, marking the One-Millionth Facebook Fan, which is the featured social media programme for this submission. It kicked-off in December 2014 and is still currently active in February 2015.

The project was launched with the creation of a series of five 1-minute videos, released over a two week period. Twenty-six staff members across all departments worked with the MIA multi-media team. Each video featured five members of MIA staff. Each one thanked an individual Facebook fan from across the world in their own language, for following the museum and being ‘One in a Million’.

Languages included English, Arabic, Tagalog, French, Spanish, Macedonian, Malayalam, Urdu, Portuguese and Farsi – thanking fans from Qatar, Brazil, Lebanon, Canada, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, USA, Australia, UK, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Scotland, Kuwait, Algeria, Palestine, Sudan, Macedonia, India, Jordan and Tunisia.

These short films also include short blooper reels of the making of the videos. All five videos and a compilation of all videos can be seen on MIA’s Youtube channel. To date, the videos have been viewed 23,000 times (unique views) on Facebook and 1,550 on Youtube.

Compilation Film – 4m 47s

In addition, as part of the ongoing initiative, we built two photo backdrops of our Facebook page, where museum visitors could take photos and tag the museum #MIAMillion. One backdrop is located at the museum entrance and the other outside the building in the MIA Park.


Facebook fans are now approaching 1.2 million.