An essential component of ensuring the success of any museum is raising awareness and bringing news about its continuing value to the local community, as well as to attract tourists. In the past, marketing campaigns have drawn attention to museums through a wide variety of mediums, from newspaper articles to television advertisements. Although these formats are often effectively used to draw visitors to museums, an essential marketing tool that has proven to be remarkably successful over the last few years is social networking. With minimal costs and the ability to reach mass audiences, social media tools are indispensable assets in marketing and promotion. The SJLM has developed a social media marketing strategy that authorized employees should follow to attract new visitors and to ensure there are repeat visits.
The SJLM has Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube accounts that it will use to communicate with patrons and inform them about events, collections, and activities. Each will be used to promote upcoming events and market collections and services to the public in order to draw a steady stream of people. In order to manage this, there are several strategies that the staff responsible should follow to optimize their use of the museum’s social media accounts.
Engage the Users
The first strategy is to engage the users by talking to them, not at them. Too many museums use sites like Twitter to just post event listings and links to press releases. The whole idea behind social media marketing is to make it participatory, and two-way, meaning that institutions can use it so that their “friends” or “followers” feel involved. Instead of posting information that explains what the museum is doing, a better strategy is to describe events and find ways to help patrons engage with the content to create conversations. This can be accomplished by asking patrons about how they relate to the materials, what services they might like, or – since this is the SJLM- what influence this gentleman might have had on their own life (Myles, 2013).
Open communication ensures that when you promote collections or attract new visitors, it will not come across as a marketing ploy to increase attendance, but as a genuine attempt to forge a connection with current and prospective patrons. By making connections with others, you create loyal patrons who will pay attention to your posts and who, with time, may champion your cause. These individuals will talk about their experiences with museums in a positive manner, likely through both digital and physical mediums, creating a slow but effective word of mouth campaign. This will also help to ensure that the museum’s champions will be more apt to donate their time and funds towards supporting our institution in the future.
Know Your Target Demographic
To have an effective marketing campaign, it is important to identify your user base. Strategically, it may be prudent to provide content directed for all possible users, but this is not realistic or feasible. While some studies show that individuals from 18 to 33 are the primary users of social media, the demographic range for the SJLM will likely be greater. However, it helps to clarify that the audience for our social media postings will be neither exclusively for the young or the elderly, and that parents will also be targeted due to Jobs’ connections to Pixar (Thackeray, 2012).
Due to the focus on the founder of Apple, a key group we should target are Apple users since they should already be inclined to learn about the history of its products and the man who created them. Another possible population to target is technologically savvy users and entrepreneurs. By tailoring postings on highly specific topics, such as artifacts from the ‘digital revolution’, we can create conversations between the patrons and our institution and encourage them to visit our physical location.
Another factor to consider is how to market our museum to locals as well as visitors from out of town. It is important not to focus entirely on one group -although visitors are an important subject group, and social media works as a global technology- locals are an important resource that should not be overlooked. We can build relationship with locals by at least occasionally posting about topics that are unique to our areas interests, such as local events (Miles, 2013). Then, to best market our institution, it is important to find a way to integrate our own collections or services with this event. For example, if there is a Pixar double feature in one of the local theaters, we can use this to highlight our Pixar collection and urge parents to bring their kids to our children’s Exploratorium to learn more about this topic.
Post on a Regular Basis
An essential step in our marketing campaign is to ensure that our social media accounts actively engage our followers and promote our events and services. Our friends and patrons will not pay attention to content in our collections and services if they stop following our accounts due to infrequent postings. To prevent interest and awareness of our institution from dwindling, designated staff members should follow the posting schedule provided by their supervisor. This schedule should also ensure that followers are not assaulted with a barrage of too many postings, which will drive them away from our institution and work against our marketing strategy.
An additional consideration should be the timing of our posts. Facebook is most heavily used in the morning, during the lunch hour, at the end of the work day around six pm, and late in the evening after ten pm (Kouvari, 2012). To effectively grab the attention of users, it would be good practice to post content during peak times and alternate the timing so that all audiences can be reached.
Provide Quality Content
One of the best ways to ensure that the social media accounts of the SJLM will become a popular online destination is to post quality content. Tweets, Facebook posts, or uploaded videos that fill space and flood follower’s pages will be kept to a minimum. Since we are a non-profit institution who is not trying to sell a product with our marketing campaign, and instead is simply trying to raise awareness of our museum and increase the number of patrons, it is imperative that we do not come across as just trying to get our name out there to sell a product. Instead, we need to provide thoughtful social media posts that demonstrate to the online community our value and how our collections are applicable to their own lives and interests (Kouvari, 2012).
Developing quality social media sites will involve including a variety of different types of posts and content, as well as including different types of media. This will include videos, pictures, and audio to engage followers. Also, directly inserting media objects into the program, instead of just providing a plain link to it, will be important (Myles, 2013). These objects should be interesting enough for followers to share with others; posts should engage enough to make followers want to share the information with friends and followers, which is an effective and inexpensive marketing strategy.
With respect to quality content, items such as trivia questions and behind-the-scenes information should be considered. Trivia questions encourage patrons to comment on posts in order to provide correct answers, and trivia knowledge can be shared with friends. This should encourage others to discuss where the original information came from and lead to the SJLM, which will encourage them to visit or pass information on to friends. Behind the scenes information should be used sparingly to pique interest and to reveal the people who can explain the exhibits and collections to visitors.
Content Moderation
Several possible drawbacks should be mentioned when setting up and maintaining social media accounts for the SJLM. Negative reviews and comments can spread quickly and become public knowledge (CHIN, 2013). Although the positive effect of museum visitors talking about their experiences is undeniable – the same may be true of negative comments. As a public institution, it is both unfair and unnecessary to delete postings and comments that reflect negatively. Instead, these types of comments should be addressed. In order to ensure the word of mouth marketing about the SJLM remains positive, it is important to respond to criticisms in a constructive and timely manner. Staff members in charge of the social media sites should regularly check the social media accounts and respond to negative and positive comments (Lauren, 2013). If comments are spam or posted by trolls seeking to get a reaction by posting crude comments, they should be deleted immediately.
The need to monitor social media profiles regularly is another possible drawback. Regular checking to ensure that the SJLM social media accounts have not been hacked, filled with spam, or negative reviews, will be essential task for our staff members, however time-consuming. This is an important step in ensuring our museum maintains social media sites as positive marketing devices so that visitors can be proud about and welcome to visit the institution.
Measure the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing Activities
Creating methods of collecting and analyzing data to confirm that the implemented marketing strategy is effective is also important. While some of the overall effect of social media should be seen in increased attendance, there are other ways to confirm that visitors are reacting positively to your social media presence. A simple way to begin the process of confirmation is to check the basic analytics of the SJLM’s social media profiles. Examining which types of posts get the most “likes” or “views” in Facebook and which tweets are re-tweeted in Twitter will be immeasurably helpful when determining which posts are most effectively creating a connection and engaging the interests of patrons (Pett, 2012). Tracking comments, age and gender of followers, overall number of followers, and how often followers mention your institution’s name when posting on their own profile will all generate useful information if available (Thackery, 2012). This data will help to determine which parts of our social media campaign resonate with the public, and will assist us in adapting our strategies to meet our target demographic.