Live from the trenches – The Social Media Presence of the Meillionydd Excavation
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 07/10/2015

Live from the trenches – The Social Media Presence of the
Meillionydd Excavation, Wales, United Kingdom

Katharina Moeller
BANGOR UNIVERSITY
Since 2010, Bangor University has been conducting excavations at the Late Bronze - Iron Age double ringwork enclosure of
Meillionydd near Rhiw on the Llyn peninsula in North-West Wales (UK). In the same year a website
(http://meillionydd.bangor.ac.uk/ ) and a Facebook page (http://facebook.com/meillionydddig ) were created; these have been
continually used to share our research through social media. Furthermore, in 2014, a twitter account
(https://twitter.com/Meillionydddig ) was set up to share the latest news live from the trenches.
Maintaining an internet presence of any kind is a lot of work. It needs to be updated regularly and new content has to be
created to keep the audience interested. While it might be easy enough to post regular news while excavating over the
summer, it is much harder to create new content during the winter when there are no spectacular new finds to share.
After more than five years of maintaining a social media presence, we have consulted our Facebook statistics and conducted a
survey to see if and how our social media activities have paid off. Who are the people that we reached via the internet? Why
did they decide to follow our work and, most importantly, what can we do to maintain or increase their interest in archaeology?