Strategy may sound rather grand for what you have in mind, after all is it a strategy to start a Twitter account? But however you take your first steps into social media, I’d recommend that you start small, concentrating on just one social media platform, until you find your feet.
Too often museums try too much to quickly, without the resources to back this up. The time you can dedicate to social media is a factor in deciding where to start. Having the time to get started with social media can be a major obstacle to museums, and in truth you’re likely to have to fit this around your regular responsibilities. But there will never be a perfect time to start and most people can, for example, fit in fifteen minutes a day to manage a Twitter account.
Twitter takes the least time, while creating content for YouTube can take considerably longer. You need to not only consider how you will manage your activity this week, or this month, but how sustainable what you’re starting will be over the long term. This again is a good reason for starting small.
Personally I believe that it is essential to have goals for your social media activity, these will give you a direction to work towards, and importantly provide a context for you to measure you success against.
Your social media strategy is where you should define you goals and I don’t mean measuring how many friends or followers you have attracted.
Social media is another tool to help your organisation to achieve it’s goals, what are those and how can you use this technology to help you to accomplish that?
Creating your own museums social media strategy
Use the following questions to help you to start to draft your own social media strategy.
What are you trying to achieve, what is your goal?
Who are you trying to reach?
What is the right social media platform to achieve your goal and reach your chosen audience?
Could you achieve this better within the museum’s website or traditional media?
How will you tie it into other things you and the rest of the organisation doing?
How much time and resources will this project take, and who will be responsible for ongoing maintenance?
How will you measure success?
How will you brand the content to ensure that it is credited as coming from the museum?
Does this fit with the overall goals of the museum?
What will happen with the project long term?
How will you stay in touch with the audiences it generates?
Is there something similar already set up which you could tap into rather than starting from scratch?
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This article was written by Jim Richardson, founder of Europe’s major conference on social media for museums, MuseumNext and managing director of Sumo, a creative agency with a reputation for developing innovative digital marketing.
Jim regularly speaks at conferences and contributes to publications on social media and digital marketing.
I really like your two last “bullets”!
Often museums and other institutions tend to work in projects - which can be fine and OK in many ways - but which is also often an obstacle when it comes to developing a deeper relationship. Is the reason, that museums are very focused on creating temporary exhibitions and acitivites as a way of generation attention and visitors?
And we may not allways have to re-invent the wheel ourselves, if someone else has a platform that runs well, has users - and is interested in cooperating.
Nice post and great list of questions. I think the starting point for any discussion of developing and implementing a social media strategy probably should go one step further back, even . . . how would a social media strategy advance your museum’s overall strategic goals? Once you’ve dialed that, then your first bullet (and all the subsequent questions) make even more sense. I think this is implied by your first question but could be even more explicit.