Open Forum

"Better than others" is obviously hyper subjective, but I will say that I'm immensely proud of the work we've been doing on our social media over the past few years.

We are a major air and space museum, and while the demographics of the people who walk through our door on-site are pretty varied since just about everyone loves an airplane, the online community around aviation and space is predominately white and male, which means that's been our primary social media audience. Starting about four years ago, we created and implemented a strategy to broaden that audience to better represent the vibrant tapestry of our subject matter. Some of the things we did include:

• Creating an overlay for our social calendar that includes prompts that ensure we're sharing information about women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, etc.
• Close collaboration with our archives, which has been doing an audit of their materials to uncover more diverse stories
• Getting buy-in from high-level leadership to "shake the boat" when we need to
• Changing up the people who appear in our videos
• Broadening the scope of these videos to focus on more general-interest topics rather than only niche (I often call it "the NPR approach")
• Planning with a platform-first approach. For example, vertical videos are the drivers on most channels. While it kills my soul as a person with a film background, I've pushed our team to keep that in mind as we create video content. We've created new long-form, horizontal video series, but we baked into them the idea that we'd be chopping them up into Reels in addition to releasing the traditional video. For example, we introduced a series of Top 5-style videos, rather than just a video talking about cool things. This structure means that a segment will only last a minute or so, letting us release the full video while also creating a Reel for each segment. Double dipping in content like that improves our reach, requires less time for me and the team, and gives us 5x the content from a single project.
• Using color-coding on my social calendar to keep a balance between selly things and fun things. With every department wanting a social post, it's easy for us to do nothing but revenue-driving posts, but that gets annoying fast for the audience. By literally color coding revenue-driving posts, I can see myself what the balance is in a given week, and also quickly show stakeholders who want their thing the calendar and say "look, see what's already scheduled? Your ask will get lost in the sea of other asks."

I've been incredibly impressed with the results, at least from a social standpoint. My philosophy is that our social media is an extension of the museum experience and consider our social media community 'visitors,' even if they don't walk through the door. I know that doesn't appease short-term sales oriented folks, but fortunately my organization understands the value in cultivating the brand online beyond just ticket sales. For example, I spend a lot of time posting about the collection, especially our digital collection, always inviting people to dive into our digital collection portal to explore for themselves. We have seen the traffic to our digital collection skyrocket on specific topics are mentioned. Does that lead to someone buying a ticket to visit? Maybe, maybe not. Will that introduction to our online research resources stick make it easier for them to use or recommend someone else come to us in the future? Absolutely, we've seen it happen. And all of this does drive sales, too. I've chatted with visitors from overseas who have come to see us specifically because of a video we did that they saw. I've also seen people from underrepresented groups reach out to us to donate collections or do public presentations as a direct result of our social media posting. I've had colleagues from other museums in our niche reach out and thank us for doing what we do, because they are able to point to our social media and say "they're doing it, why can't we?" (I mean this especially in terms of DE&I). I am in a place of privilege because my institution saw the importance of social media 10 years ago and created a full-time position just dedicated to it, which is the only way we've been able to do so much. I acknowledge that this is simply out of reach for many museums, where social media is one of 15 duties someone has to attend to on any given day. That said, I go into work every day knowing that what I do matters, and am so proud that we as a museum are able to use our social media to lead the way in our niche towards a more comprehensive telling of the story.