A bit of exploratory thinking I've been doing recently - which should apply to all sorts of organisations, not just galleries.
Some galleries use social media – Twitter and Facebook – as advertising, ie to promote its activities to its ‘friends’, eg to around 250 people who might follow it on Twitter, and around 350 people who might ‘like’ its page on Facebook. This is fine as far as it goes, but social media can be harnessed to do much more than this.
Yes, Twitter can be used to promote current and future exhibitions. But people who use Twitter don’t tend to go on there to find out what’s on. They go to the What's On guides for that. They go to Twitter to find out what people think, what people are saying, and to engage with the human face of institutions – and the gallery's social media strategy needs to reflect a policy of active engagement. This should be threefold -
1. increase the number of followers you have
2. ensure that your tweets are engaging and interesting
3. ensure that your tweets reach people apart from your followers.
And this blog should address some of these areas.
Tweets need to be specifically composed so that they will get to people who are searching for specific key words (in twitter terms, “#hashtags”, ie areas of interest). They need to appeal to a wider audience – and they need to excite the reader and make them want to ‘retweet’ them to their own followers.
The gallery/organisation needs to decide:
For a gallery, for example, apart from the forthcoming exhibitions, focus on specific paintings, etc, in what areas does the gallery want to be seen as an expert and having something to say? Can the gallery comment on other exhibitions opening worldwide? On policy about art collections? On art in schools? On the weather? On the riots?
- WHO does it want to say it to
Who comes to the gallery? Who are the target audiences? Does it want to expand these wider? Think about all the schools in the world using its materials? Politicians? Art historians? Researchers? Find those people and follow them - then they might follow you back.
what kind of ‘personality’ does it want to show to the world. Is it happy with a young, text-speak ‘look’? Does it want to get its audiences playing games, looking out for its jokes and regular commentary, as well as knowing what’s going on? So, for example, @Tate on 7th September linked to the Rothko painting Untitled circa 1950-2 and said “Morning all, we're feeling a little yellow today, what colour sums up your mood right now?” They got all kinds of replies, including followers who started playing ‘musical colour’ games like ‘red zeppelin’, ‘beige against the machine’, and ‘blue kids on the block’.
- WHAT DIALOGUE does it want to get going
It needs to get its audiences retweeting its posts, posting themselves about its shows and about its opinions. This is where ‘active engagement’ comes in.
Will interns, volunteers, full time staff, do the tweeting? Will they make a new blog and link to that regularly? Who will write the blog? Will the interns make up their own tweets? Will the curatorial staff direct them? Lots of different models to play with, none are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
Richard McManus, in a blog entitled How Art Museums and Galleries can use Social Media,cites Lauren Cornell, executive director of the technology-focused art organization Rhizome,who writes that ‘institutions could amplify their educational and social role by publishing - daily and online - a great deal more history, opinion, context and anecdote around their activities, rather than just issuing press releases and visitor information’.
Practicalities
Use hashtags – look at what’s trending. For example, you could add #art #exhibition #london for every post about a forthcoming exhibition at a London gallery. Remember that people might be doing searches for art, or for London, or for exhibitions. And you need people to find you - so use your specific name - all the different ways in which people know you - in some of your tweets and in your descriptor, to lead people who are specifically searching for you, to your twitter feed.
But, I can’t stress enough – don’t just tweet about your own shows. People are recommending a four to one ratio - for every tweet you want to make about your own work, put in four tweets about other fascinating things that your followers and others will want to hear about. What else to do? Well...
- choose some more interesting galleries and arts organisations to follow, retweet some of their posts, and tweet personally to them about their stuff so they get to know you and follow you back.
- use #FF: ‘follow Friday’ – every Friday, you should recommend our favourite twitter users for your followers to follow – and every Friday, see who others are recommending, and increase the numbers of twitter accounts you follow.
- play some tweet-games to get your followers tweeting back.
At specific events, you can arrange 'tweet-ins': here's an example of how the Royal Opera House did it recently (thanks to @lipadapa for finding that one).
The use of social media in the museum world is very new, and there are no easy answers and ‘how-to’ guides. Kirsty Beavan, writing on behalf of the Tate in a blog entry headed 'Should museums be using social media more creatively?’ put it like this
When you’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+ (or whatever’s new this month!), as yourself, you you tend to know what you’re there for. When you’re there representing an institution, however, it’s much harder to define exactly why you’re there – and what your fans or followers want from you being there! Even when you ask, of course, different people want different things at different times. ... Advice from the “gurus” is often heavily focused on promotion, whether of yourself, your product or your brand – acquiring followers and return on investment. But when your role is to promote, educate, enthuse, inspire and generally deliver a public service, no one yet seems to have the guru-stylings to fit the peculiar problems of the cultural organisation.
You can be confident, then, that this is an emerging art – however small you are, you can situate yourselves with the big players, because everyone’s learning! There are masters degrees these days in subjects like 'Digital Anthropology', 'New Media and Society' and 'Digital Media'. If you can find some funds to engage people who have done these degrees on course-based placements, interns, or better still real jobs, they can help you turn real activity into cyberspace conversations.
