Social Media for Museums: 13 Easy Steps to Increasing Your Online Exposure Organically
Did you know that social media has become one of the primary marketing channels over the last two decades?
Two facts for you:
4.62 billion people use social media and spend an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes on social networks per day.
71% of small-to-mid sized businesses turn to social channels to market themselves.
This involves museums, too - only in Italy, 76% of art institutions have a Facebook account for promotional purposes.
So, why is the phenomenon increasing? And why do museums need social media?
The answer is simple.
Social media represents an excellent opportunity to connect with your following, boost brand awareness, engage wide audiences with unique, informative content, and reach potential visitors worldwide.
Even though most museums are on social networks, not many get successful results - that’s because they don’t have a strategy in place nor do they know how to build one.
They struggle staying relevant to their audience and barely trigger conversations through their posts.
If this sounds like you and want to learn more, keep reading!
I’ll walk you through 13 easy steps to creating an effective social media strategy that helps grow your online presence (organically!), develop strong interactions with followers, and drive sales.
Let’s jump right in!
Social Media for Museums - Table of Contents
Why Is Social Media Important for Museums?
Social Media for Museums: A 13-Step Strategy
Why Is Social Media Important for Museums?
Let’s face it: your museum needs a social media presence.
Small or big your institution is, it doesn’t matter - social media for museums is a powerful tool for getting more visibility online, building engaged communities, and attracting new leads.
You’re able to spread your mission and values to the right people and build long-term loyalty. (If you get your followers interested enough through engaging, quality content, they’ll start seeing you as an authority; they’ll want to connect with you and visit your museum.)
According to these stats:
52% of social media marketers believe social media positively influences their company’s revenue and sales. (Clutch)
77% of consumers will choose a brand over a competitor after a positive experience with a brand on social media. (Sproutsocial)
Chart summarizing the importance and growth of social media. (Datareportal)
In case you’re wondering “how will social media affect museum communication?”, consider the multiple ways social networks ensure online success:
They enable you to build trust, authority, and brand relevance.
They facilitate human relations.
They boost organic visibility.
They provide new forms of self-promotion.
They generate leads.
They drive website traffic.
They make networking and partnerships easy to develop and maintain.
Leveraging social media marketing for museums is a wise move to achieve your business priorities; but you must develop a solid strategy, along with a content plan that makes you stand out.
Social Media for Museums: A 13-Step Strategy
A social media strategy defines your action plan and gives value to your marketing efforts. It helps you set clear goals, understand your target audience, optimize resources, measure your ROI, and improve your performance.
To effectively market yourself on social media, it’s indispensable to develop a strategy that is specific and relevant to your brand identity and needs.
In 13 easy steps, you’ll learn how your museum can use social media to increase engagement, generate conversions, and form lasting connections.
It’s time to build your results-driven social media strategy.
Let’s do this!
1. Do Social Media Audit
Conducting a social media audit is essential to analyze your social presence, monitor the performance of your accounts, and measure the progress of your marketing goals.
Ask yourself:
Who is engaging with my content?
Which social platform does my target audience use?
What type of content do they prefer?
What’s working well, and what’s not?
What sets me apart from the competition?
With these core questions, you’ll pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses and find viable ways to increase your social media efforts.
Collect all your information on an Excel spreadsheet to clearly see what direction your social media strategy is taking and if you need to change your approach going forward.
Social media audit template. (Hootsuite)
A few recommendations when auditing:
Identify your top-performing posts based on the engagement rate, conversions, or link clicks. (You can use the built-in analytics tools for each social network or external tools like Hootsuite or Sproutsocial.)
Study your following on every platform to learn what their sentiment is and what content interests them the most. (Begin with the audience demographics section of your social media.)
Conduct regular social media audits - monthly or quarterly - to keep track of the results over time, compare your social media insights with previous analysis, and assess your ROI.
2. Set Up Your Goals
When using social media for museums, you need to define SMART goals that guarantee a long-term, successful strategy.
The SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) ensures concrete marketing results - your actions will be on track and your social media goals will stay aligned with your museum’s business priorities.
Social media goal setting. (Merchant Media)
Every social network has a unique purpose, meaning you’ll need to set different goals for each platform and track different metrics. (If you plan to use Instagram for brand awareness, the metric you’ll focus on is the engagement rate coming from comments, shares, saved posts, and story views.)
Bear in mind to focus on valuable metrics like conversion, engagement, and click-through rates rather than simple likes or the number of followers - what matters is the authentic, human interactions you build with your audience!
Whatever goals you aim to accomplish, from educating your audience to promoting new initiatives or increasing admission and membership sales, make sure your social media posts resonate with your community and add value.
3. Write Social Media Community Guidelines
How do museums use social media?
When devising a strategy, you have to provide your team, collaborators, partners, and whoever is involved in your museum with the right tools for engaging on social media in a positive, respectful, and inclusive way.
You’ll do this by creating and sharing social media community guidelines on your website.
Consider it as an instructional book for social media best practices outlining:
How to moderate posts and comments.
What’s tolerated and what can be banned or reported.
How to make the right choices when managing social media.
How to keep a positive and healthy behavior that benefits your institution, employees, and community.
ICOM clearly explains the purpose of social media guidelines in its manual, along with recommendations on how to optimize social media for museums.
“Rather than creating multiple accounts on many different social media platforms, which are then abandoned as it becomes too difficult to maintain them, it is much more effective to choose a select number to be active on. A strong presence on a few platforms is better than a weak presence on many.”
Here’s what to include in social media guidelines:
Links to your museum’s social accounts.
Disclosure and transparency rules.
Privacy rules.
Equal representation and inclusivity.
Anti-harassment policy.
Cyber safety protocols.
Do’s and don’ts.
Links to useful resources, both internal (e.g. your museum documents) and external (e.g. legal resources).
Legal Considerations (intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, etc.)
Take inspiration from museums like the Tacoma Art Museum or Guggenheim to develop your own social media guidelines.
4. Set Your TOV
The tone of voice (TOV) determines how your content is written and perceived by the reader based on the words used, the emotions shared, and the impact communication has on your audience.
The tone changes according to the context of your messaging and aims at creating an emotional connection with people.
On social media, you have the chance to lighten the tone, making it more entertaining, direct, sympathetic, and - in some occasions - also humorous.
The writing style reflects your brand identity, mission, and values and identifies you to your followers in a distinctive way.
To effectively set your TOV, define:
Your goals and beliefs.
Your position in the industry.
Who your audience is and what its needs are.
How your audience communicates.
What tone your competitors have.
Elaborate a brand voice document to share with your team and use it as a baseline for your social media strategy.
5. Write Photo Guidelines
Social media is a great tool for sharing any visuals - especially Instagram, one of the most popular photo and video-sharing social networks.
Museums and social media are a powerful combo in this sense since art is made for being seen.
According to a study by Brain Rules, when people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retain 65% of the information three days later.
This means that the general population is visual learners.
When planning museum social media campaigns and day-to-day posts, ask yourself:
How do I want to present my photos?
What will the image subjects be?
Will people be involved? And how will they be photographed?
What colors, filters, or tones do I want to use?
For Instagram, do I want an impactful grid look?
The photography must reflect your museum’s identity; it “tells” your audience who you are, what your story is, and how you want to be remembered.
Make sure your photography style guide includes:
Composition. (How do you showcase an artwork? Will people stare at the camera?)
Tone. (Will you opt for warm tones and minimalism? Or for dynamic images and bright colors?)
People. (What emotions should they communicate?)
Storytelling. (What story do you want to convey?)
6. Create Your Editorial Calendar
A social media editorial calendar helps you decide what types of content you want to create, when to publish, and where you’ll share your posts.
It reflects your social media goals and helps you stay organized with all of your social media activities.
Social media content calendar template. (Hootsuite)
Plan your content by following the 80-20 rule, where 80% of social media posts inform, educate, and are useful to your audience, and only 20% explicitly sell your services/products.
How often should a museum post on social media?
There isn't a specific rule here - it all depends on your business priorities and audience behavior:
On what channels are they more active?
How much time do they spend on each platform?
When do you register the highest engagement with your posts?
Keep a balance and evaluate how often you want to post depending on the social media you use - the average posting frequency on Twitter is 1-5 times per day, but on Instagram is 3-7 times per week.
One last recommendation…
Consistency is key to content planning; so, prepare your posts in advance and turn to scheduling tools like Airtable, Asana, or SproutSocial to ease your work.
7. Engage With Your Following
You can’t successfully use social media for museums without knowing your audience first.
To create compelling content that converts, start from these critical questions:
Who are they?
What are their needs and desires?
What do they want to see on social media?
What kind of content do they like and engage with the most?
Learn from your followers, socialize with them, and make them feel involved - thanks to the connections you build, you’ll stand every chance of turning them into visitors/customers!
Keep your posts fresh and eye-catching by diversifying the content types you aim to publish; align your copy with your marketing goals and test what works best on each network.
Using engagement-based content like polls, quizzes, “tag-a-friend” posts, or giveaways is a great way to encourage interactions, increase visibility, and gain trust.
Not only will your audience come back to your account, but it’ll also mention your brand to others, share your content, and possibly visit your museum one day.
To grow your social media presence and nurture a tight-knit community:
Reply to comments and tags from your followers.
Like and reshare the photos they’ve posted about your museum.
Like and comment on the posts that mention you.
Respond to private messages.
Answer questions.
Provide additional info in the comments to educate and foster conversations.
Join chats across the networks to extend your reach.
Side note: platforms like Instagram and Facebook reward content with a high engagement rate by showing it to more users. The more valuable and enticing your posts are, the more online exposure you’ll get.
8. Use Gifs, Memes, and UGC
To make things even more appealing on social media, museums have started using trending marketing tools like gifs, memes, and user-generated content.
Integrating these elements in your posts will help you:
Enhance visibility.
Increase engagement through likes, comments, and shares.
Create connections.
Humanize your brand identity.
Make your content more accessible (particularly to millennials).
Promote your collections in original ways.
Attract visitors cost-effectively.
Drive ticket and membership sales.
“Regarding the meme-ification of visual artworks, we’ve found that it’s a great way to connect with at least one large segment of our audience—particularly those who skew younger. It lowers the “intimidation factor” traditional art history might have, and provides an easy entry point for people whose interests may not fall squarely in the visual art realm.”
Stay relevant to your audience by experimenting with new content types and keep innovating.
UGC is, for example, an excellent way to share authentic experiences at your museum by pulling content from users and reposting it on your social platforms.
People learn about your reputation through real stories; they look at your collections/exhibits/services, share their impressions with the online community, and inspire others to visit your museum.
9. Connect With Influencers
People trust people, especially when it comes to influencers.
As reputable experts in their field, they widely impact users’ decisions through their suggestions or endorsements - it’s not a case that many brands rely on them to boost their reach and drive more leads.
Check this:
49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations, with 40% purchasing something after seeing it on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.
Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular forms of online marketing, with a growth of approximately $16.4 Billion in 2022.
Integrating this marketing tool into your social media strategy will benefit your museum.
Here’s why:
You deliver your message to a specific, invested niche who may be attracted by what you offer.
Rather than opting for traditional marketing campaigns, you increase user engagement through organic, collaborative content.
You grow your brand awareness with the support of a trusted source (the influencer) that speaks directly to your target audience.
Do an accurate research on your social networks (Instagram and Twitter seem to be the most effective influencer channels) to choose the influencer who fits with your brand’s values:
Does the influencer have a strong tie with my niche interest areas?
What’s the size of their social following? Is it critical to achieve my goals?
What’s the influencer’s reputation?
What content do they create?
Will their followers be genuinely interested in my institution?
Remember: focusing on the person who has developed the best trust with your target audience is more relevant than a big following - strive for authenticity!
It’s time to connect with your influencers:
Reach out to them via email or direct message on their social media.
Provide guidelines on the campaign you want to run with them, but give space to their own creativity and voice.
Highlight what value the collaboration will bring, even if it’s not a monetary partnership (a private exhibit tour, all-access pass, year membership, etc.).
Suggest content ideas and be transparent about your expectations.
Work with them in an engaging, human way.
Keep the relationship going for future projects.
10. Use Hashtags
You won’t make the most of social media for museums if you don’t have a hashtag strategy.
Whether it’s trending hashtags, branded hashtags or niche-related hashtags, people are able to find you through specific keywords they search for; they engage with your content and get to know your brand.
Many advantages come from this since you…
Expand your organic growth.
Increase brand awareness.
Categorize your content and make it valuable to the audience.
Promote yourself by highlighting your collections/special exhibits/events.
Encourage conversations.
Form a community of like-minded people and prospective visitors.
To get the best results, adapt your hashtag strategy to each of your social media platforms; add your brand hashtags - if you have any - to your Twitter or Instagram bio to let followers know which ones to use to interact with you; and focus on creating entertaining, informative content that speaks to your target.
11. Share Behind-The-Scenes Content
Producing behind-the-scenes content and regularly sharing it on social media allows you to boost engagement and develop trust.
Through photos, short videos, or live chats, you’ll bring in a unique and original perspective of your museum.
You have the chance to…
Show what’s normally unseen (an artwork restoration, exhibitions setups, preventive conservation etc.).
Give people an inside look into who you are, what you do on a daily basis, and what your institution represents for the community.
Offer exclusive experiences to your audience.
Educate the public on lesser-known items in your collection.
People appreciate this type of content because they’re involved in something new beyond what they typically see in person. They feel inspired and encouraged to rely on your brand.
Here are some ideas for your behind-the-scenes posts:
Showcase your team at work and talk about your daily tasks.
Interview your team and let them step into the spotlight.
Share sneak peeks at new projects or upcoming events.
Take pictures of your work environment.
Give special tours around your museum.
Test your following’s reaction to your posts; analyze their level of engagement and the results you get to maximize your strategy.
12. Collaborate With Local Partners
Your museum plays a key role in society.
As a representative of the history, culture, and values of a community, you can cooperate with partners to offer viable solutions to collective problems and develop social change campaigns to promote on social media, too.
Collaborating with local organizations is an amazing opportunity to:
Extend your brand awareness to audiences that aren’t easy to reach - especially the underserved ones.
Spread your mission, expertise, and resources.
Develop long-lasting relationships with community groups.
Contribute to the health and welfare of society by addressing social issues.
“Community organizations and museums have a common interest, they both want to make their cities a better place.”
Collaborative public, private, and nonprofit partnerships drive positive change as they help form a better community, create more social capital, and work to achieve mutual, beneficial goals.
Culture and Local Development: Maximizing The Impact. (ICOM, 2019)
Here’s how to build a successful collaboration:
Start small: collaborations require patience, planning, and commitment.
Start early: set aside enough time to prepare all you need for the collaborative project.
Get to know your partner’s purpose, activities, strengths, and audience.
Communicate your expectations and goals to work in the same direction as your partner organization.
Define each other’s roles and responsibilities.
Set a clear timeline to monitor your progress.
Foster mutual trust through ongoing conversations.
Monitor your activities and reflect on possible improvements or changes.
But before anything else, determine what partnership is appropriate for your situation based on your resources, skills, and the potential benefits coming from the collaboration.
You can network with local museums to set up special exhibitions and promote them simultaneously on your social media accounts; or partner with schools to offer online learning experiences for children and families.
This and other initiatives will grow your exposure, attract more visitors, and generate new forms of income.
13. Analyze Your Results
As you start implementing your social media strategy, you need to track your performance, monitor the results you get, and make the necessary adjustments to improve your activity.
Find out what’s working and do more of it. Assess your audience behavior and keep producing the content that engages the most.
All your data will be part of a report that you’ll regularly review and update to stay in line with your marketing goals.
A few recommendations:
Look at social media analytics and performance metrics.
Test different posts, social media campaigns, and other strategies.
Use tools like Buffer or Zoho Social to gather more data and create instant reports.
Take surveys to evaluate your strategy and the sentiment of your audience
Check the performance of your channels at least once a week.
By taking these actions, you’ll build a loyal online community that will come back to your content, interact with you, and want to see your museum offline too.
Looking for effective ways to increase the social media presence of your museum? Download the FREE Social Media Strategy Checklist to build your online success organically!
An Effective Strategy Will Help You Make the Most of Social Media for Museums
At the beginning of this blog, you probably had a lot of questions in mind: How are museums using social media? How can I develop better interactions with my following? How can I spur people to visit my museum?
The struggle is real and involves many established, authoritative institutions whose form of communication tends to be distant from the audience’s needs and desires.
This calls for a change.
Instead of being seen as an inaccessible tourist destination, start having a more human and personable approach to your community - especially online!
Social media helps you do this by being a powerful tool to form true relationships, elaborate exciting and valuable content for your readers, reach new visitors, and accomplish your business goals.
But following the right strategy is key to success.
Every museum is different and has its mission.
So, adapt the 13-step social media strategy to your personal needs. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your social networks and give space to your creative flow.
With these social media guidelines, you’ll be one step ahead in making your online presence - and brand - shine! 🌟
