Archive for the ‘Social Media Guidelines’ Category

Creating a Social Media Editorial Plan for a museum

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Updating the Social Media presence for your museum may seem overwhelming, with Twitter and Facebook updates alone demanding perhaps half an hour in your already busy day.

One way to approach this is with a Social Media Editorial Plan which is used to plan out your content for the week or even the month ahead.

Jesse Ringham, Digital Communications Manager at TATE told me, ‘We have a weekly meeting which brings together people from across our press, marketing, visitor experience and digital teams to discuss what worked in the previous week, what we have coming up and to plan the week ahead. This means that you know each day what you need to do, and it gives you more time to respond to tweets or Facebook posts from the public’.

An editorial calendar doesn’t replace reactionary tweeting or Facebook posts, but acts as a backbone to your social media activity, ensuring that your audiences get fresh and interesting content even when you’re busy.

As Jesse described in the case of TATE, ideally this plan is created through a quick weekly meeting, which provides a forum for people from across your museum to make suggestions. The content should be steered by the overall goal of your social media activity and by the audiences that each network connects you with.

As well as bringing together different voices from across the organisation, an editorial meeting can hopefully share the work which needs to be done across a number of people.

Some activities such as blogging are especially demanding, and it is essential that the burden of creating content isn’t all on one individual, not only because of the time that this takes, but also because you will get better content if a range of voices and opinions are included.

Mark out the content which you will publish day-by-day across the social media platforms that you are active on and try and establish regular features to make your life easier. It is fine duplicate some of content that you broadcast on Facebook on Twitter and vice-versa.

Some museums use web based calendar software such as Google Calendar to share their social media schedule with colleagues. This is especially useful when a number of people are delivering the editorial plan across different social media channels.

Once the plan has been agreed, automated updates can be scheduled using a third party website like Hootsuite. This is especially useful for planning updates for weekends.

A social media editorial meeting can also be a forum for housekeeping, for example agreeing a hashtag for an exhibition or event which will be used across all social media platforms.

How does your museum plan out it’s social media activity? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Creating social media guidelines for a museum

Monday, September 26th, 2011

In many museums you will find enthusiastic members of staff who understand that social media can play an important role in a museum, but who find it difficult to persuade their management team, board or the local government who manage their service to let them proceed.

Social Media Guidelines are one way to help those with concerns by showing that you are managing any risk associated with social media, and setting clear boundaries around how museum staff will participate on these websites.

Another driver for creating Social Media Guidelines may be that a growing number of people in your organisation want to use social media and as this activity is decentralised you need to provide guidance across your museum.

If you are just starting to use social media on your museums behalf, and your under no pressure to formalise the work that you are doing from management, then you probably don’t need guidelines, but as you get to grips with social media tools it makes sense to share what you learn by creating guidelines for your organisation.

The guidelines will typically contain:

- An overview of what the museum is trying to achieve with social media
- Approval procedures and contacts
- Personal use of social media
- Tone of voice when speaking on behalf of the museum
- How images should be attributed and copyright issues
- How the museum’s brand should be reproduced on social networks
- How to deal with complaints
- A directory of all the social media networks on which the museum is active on
- Measuring success

Your social media guidelines should be a living document; changing frequently as the way that the museum uses social media evolves.

The National Museums Scotland Social Media Guidelines and this list of not-for-profit Social Media Guidelines offer valuable insight into what these documents might look like.

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