Social Media Reset
We’re going to take some time in the New Year to offer up some social media support for our museum and nonprofit folks. Social media remains a crucial part of marketing and outreach for many organizations. Do you feel like you are up-to-speed on best practices? Does your organization invest resources into social media management? If you manage a bustling social media presence, how do you care for yourself in the process? Read on for some ideas to answer these questions.
2023 Best Practices
Video will remain an essential way to reach your audience in 2023 on all platforms. Video doesn’t need to be polished, nor does it need to be long. In fact, video engagement drastically drops at the 30 second and two-minute mark!
According to Rival IQ, these are the 2023 benchmarks for posting and anticipated engagement rates on facebook, instagram, and twitter in the new year:
Facebook: 7.57 posts/0.1114%
Instagram: 4.45 posts/1.039%
Twitter: 9.86 posts/0.054%
Many organizations are making the jump to TikTok and away from Twitter. Our advice? Know where your audience is! If your audience is actively engaged on Facebook and Twitter, consider staying engaged. If you’re seeing viral views on Instagram and TikTok, make the case for more investment in these platforms.
Make the investment
Many, but not all professionals and people in leadership roles have come around to the fact that social media management is not a fun job for an unpaid intern. Social media strategies and tactics take human and financial resources and organizations need to invest to reap the benefits. In large museums and global nonprofits, there is likely a team of marketers dedicated to growing brand engagement. Most museums and nonprofits do not fall into these categories! In many cases, social media is an “other duty as required” and time and money are not spent wisely to tap into this resource.
If you are a solo, do-it-all director or part of a small marketing team, there are excellent resources that are cost-effective and time saving. An ideal place to start this investment is with a third-party posting software. At MuseumTastic, we’re big fans of Loomly. It’s been a cost-effective way for us to manage weekly posting to multiple channels while saving our founder precious time to focus on projects. Hootsuite and Lately.AI are two other fantastic tools that offer nonprofit rates. Last, Canva is an all-in-one design and social media tool that is FREE for nonprofits. Each of these tools has pros and cons, but we have found that a small financial investment helps to save time and money in the long run.
Social Media Manager Self Care
Managing social media can be incredibly rewarding and devastating. For every five star review or compliment about an exhibit, there are trolls who leave unfounded one-star reviews or intolerable comments. It is crucial for museum and nonprofit leadership to recognize the emotional challenges of managing platforms of engagement. If you are a social media manager, it is essential for you to take care of yourself as you manage complicated dialogue as the voice of your organization.
One way to help stop difficult dialogue before it starts is to have a social media policy. What language and tone of comments will your organization allow and engage with? What gets hidden or deleted? How do you decide who could be banned from interaction with your pages? A simple policy can start to set your social media person/team up for success.
It is important for leadership and museum/nonprofit employees to be another set of eyes and ears on social media channels. Not only does this support the engagement algorithm, it also help to alert staff to inappropriate public commentary and give small social media teams a boost of moral support to the person/people in charge of posting and engagement. Knowing the dialogue on these channels should also let leadership know what is “really” happening in terms of dialogue, where pain points are for friends and supporters, and where successes are that can be capitalized on. Finally, being alert to what’s happening on social media can be helpful in being a better human resource manager – if difficult dialogue is being managed, help your people out by checking on their emotional well being.