Between 2008 and 2012, the Vancouver Police Museum became the most-followed museum in Canada on Twitter—not through paid advertising or institutional clout, but by actually understanding what social media was for and being willing to experiment faster than anyone else.

Location helped. We were in Gastown, right in the middle of Vancouver’s tech incubator district during its early boom years. Mozilla, Hootsuite, and a dozen other startups were within walking distance, and we made a point of showing up at their receptions and parties—not to ask for money, but because the conversations were interesting. When you tell a room full of developers that museums are sitting on massive amounts of well-structured data and you’re thinking about APIs, you get their attention fast. Most museums weren’t even sure if Twitter was appropriate yet. We were talking about metadata architecture.

Part of the advantage was scale. We didn’t think of ourselves primarily as an institution—we thought of ourselves as a place. That made it easier to try things, abandon them quickly, and learn in public without worrying about precedent or permission. Larger museums often had more resources, but their institutional self-image made even small risks feel heavy. For us, experimentation was lighter, faster, and easier to recover from if it didn’t work.

We launched the museum’s Facebook presence in 2008, early enough that we were explaining to colleagues why it mattered. We put our photo collection on Flickr with geotagging so people could see where historical images were taken. We were one of Groupon’s first Vancouver offers and hosted Yelp Elite events when most cultural institutions didn’t know what Yelp was. We used our blog as a content marketing engine before “content marketing” was a phrase anyone used in the museum sector.

The digital work wasn’t separate from the programming—it was how we reached people who wouldn’t otherwise find us. We tested platforms constantly, figured out what worked, and moved fast enough that larger institutions would call asking how we’d done it. The short answer was that we treated digital channels like actual audience development tools, not like bulletin boards, and we were comfortable being the ones figuring it out rather than waiting for someone else to go first.

The work positioned the museum as a thought leader in digital heritage, generated consistent media coverage, and—critically—drove attendance to programs and events. Social media wasn’t the point. Connection was. The digital tools just made it scalable.