Over one million followers of the Auschwitz Memorial on social media
Paweł Sawicki
Twitter account is followed by 663 thousand users, on Facebook – over 308 thousand and over 77 thousand on Instagram (on 25 November 2019).
The Auschwitz Museum has been developing its presence in social media since 2009. “We started – as the first institution of this kind in the world – with our Facebook page as we noticed that this is where the users search for the information about the history of Auschwitz and they find different – better or worse – pages devoted to the history of the camp. So, we agreed that – as a Memorial Site – we should be present there in order to be accessible, so that people could reach us, ask questions and discover the history. A few years later we launched our accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Now, also as the first institution of this kind in the world, we have reached a million followers”, said Paweł Sawicki, responsible for the Museum social media.
The main aim of the presence of the Auschwitz Museum in social media consists in commemorating the victims and educating about the history of Auschwitz, but each of the sites represents totally different characteristics. “What matters most it is everyday work consisting in reminding of the facts referring to camp history, specific people, victims, stories as well as showing the extremely difficult, complex and multidimensional character of camp history”, Paweł Sawicki emphasizes.
Twitter constitutes the most important channel of communication, through which we not only remind of camp victims, but also contact with the representatives of the media, conduct public dialogue, publish official statements, react to press releases containing substantial errors or undertake necessary steps when the reputation of Auschwitz victims is damaged.
Within the period of two years, the number of followers grew from 50 thousand in September 2017 to 650 thousand in November 2019. In 2018, the list of top ten Polish tweets (biggest number of shares and likes – data: Sotrender) included 6 written by the Auschwitz Museum. In October 2019, Museum’s tweets were viewed nearly 58 million times.
Over a million people from all over the world follow social media profiles of the Auschwitz Memorial Site on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thanks to sharing the posts published by the Museum, facts from the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz reach dozens million people.