Looking to use social media as a way to enhance your efforts this Museums Advocacy Day? Learn why you should use social media for advocacy and how to do it in this presentation.
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
1. Using Social Media to Make an
Impact at
#MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and
Beyond
Amanda Sterling,
Social Media Coordinator,
The Corning Museum of Glass
2. Why Use Social Media for Advocacy?
• Congressional representatives have
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
accounts
• Your friends, family, and colleagues
are on social media
• It’s quick, easy, and can be done
remotely!
Source: 28+ Powerful Facebook Stats Your Brand Can’t Ignore in 2017, Sprout Social,
9/11/17. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-stats-for-marketers/
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
3. Institutional versus Personal Advocacy
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Institutional Personal
• Possible if it fits institutional voice
• Share grant announcements,
statistics, community work
• Share stories from people affected by
your institution
• Thank congressional representatives
for support
• People trust the opinions of their
peers highly
• Share personal impact
• Share links and calls-to-action
4. Facebook versus Twitter
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Facebook Twitt
er
• Mostly used as personal network
• Comments/private messages
• Share articles and information to
mobilize personal networks
• Harder to hit character limit (3000
characters)
• Personal, but geared toward
professional usage
• Easily searchable via hashtags
• Shorter messages with threaded
replies
• Very shareable
5. Twitter Basics
1. Set up an account with a
personal email, professional
username, and professional
profile picture
2. For advocacy efforts, make
account public. Add job
information and relevant
users/hashtags in bio.
3. Know your limits: 280
characters, 4 pictures, 2 minutes
and 20 seconds of videos
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Optional
Information
6. Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Profile: access your
profile and settings
Like
Retweet or quote tweet:
Retweet= directly share to your
profile
Quote tweet= share to your profile
with additional comment
Reply: creates threaded reply to
tweeter and anyone tagged in
the tweet
Tweet
Direct Message: send
this tweet directly to
another Twitter user in a
private message
Home
Search Notifications
Your Direct
Messages
7. How to Use Twitter:
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
8. How to Use Twitter:
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
9. Photo and Video Tips:
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and
Beyond
• Take photos and videos horizontally
• Brighten images to make them pop
• Images with people (specifically faces)
work best in terms of reaching people
• Video: short, simple, to the point
10. General Social Media Advocacy Tips
Do:
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Don’t:
• Tweet often
• Remain respectful
• Share stories
• Use photos and videos
• Engage with other advocates
• Share articles and resources
• Share personally identifying
information or harmful content
• Spam accounts or feed trolls
• #Make a #Tweet #all #hashtags
• Use #hashtags in running text
• #makehashtagslikethis
• Share uncaptioned videos
11. Advocacy Hashtags and Accounts
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Hashtags Accounts
#MuseumsAdvocacy
#MuseumsAdvocacy2018
#ITweetMuseums
#ArtsAdvocacy
@aamers (American Alliance of Museums)
@US_IMLS (Institute of Library and Museum
Services)
@MuseumHack
@LottLaura
…and many others
14. #MuseumsAdvocacy Examples
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
http://aam-us.org/advocacy/state-snapshots http://aam-us.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/infographic-2-pg-
color.pdf?sfvrsn=4
16. #MuseumsAdvocacy Resources
Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Congressional social media accounts:
http://www.congressweb.com/AAM/Legislators/Main
Museums Do That video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVflfF-Pb7I
AAM Publicity Tools: http://aam-us.org/advocacy/museums-advocacy-day/publicity-tools
Museum Hack’s 2017 Round-Up: https://museumhack.com/museums-advocacy-day-
2017/
Advocacy Twitter List: https://twitter.com/amsterli/lists/museumsadvocacy
17. Using Social Media to Make an Impact at #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 and Beyond
Questions?
@amsterli
sterlingal@cmog.org
Notas del editor
Good afternoon everyone, my name is Amanda Sterling, I’m the social media coordinator at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY and I’m very honored to have the opportunity to welcome you all to Museums Advocacy Day 2018. Who’s here for their first MAD? Who’s been here before? Who has used social media to advocate for museums in the past? When people think about museums advocacy, they primarily think about the more traditional ways to contact their congressional representatives: site visits, phone calls, and emails. While all of those methods are great ways to advocate for museums, you can also use social media in place of these advocacy methods or as a supplement to them. I’ll be focusing primarily on Facebook and Twitter for the sake of time, but you can use any social media channel for advocacy depending on how you use it. Over the next forty or so minutes, I’ll run through why you should use social media for your advocacy efforts and how to do it and hopefully we’ll have time left for any questions you may have.
Time: 0:46
Why should you consider social media for your advocacy efforts? Your congressional representatives and their staffers maintain Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts, which you can look up using the list compiled by AAM, which will be linked to at the end of this presentation. Many representatives will engage in conversation with their constituents on these pages and comments and posts are included in the weekly reports that representatives receive about constituent feedback. Since these comments and posts are public, you also have the potential to reach more people with your advocacy message on congressional social media accounts.
Furthermore, the people you care about the most are also on social media. In fact, in June 2017, Facebook announced that they now have 2 billion monthly active users on the platform. That’s a lot of people to potentially reach with messages about the importance of museums. Social media can be a great educational tool for teaching your friends and family about why you’re passionate about museums. You can build a network of museum advocates on social media by posting photos, videos, and links that demonstrate the impact museums have on our economy, educational systems, and so many other things. It’s definitely great to use social media as a way to quickly share great resources you find without having to come up with the entire message by yourself. It’s especially great to use links in your social media posts as a direct call-to-action to make it even simpler for your networks to become involved in museums advocacy. For most people, if a task takes more than three simple steps to accomplish, they’re not likely to follow through, so a link to a form letter or petition makes the chance of someone taking action much higher.
Many potential museum advocates may find the cost of site visits to be financially prohibitive in terms of lost wages to visit during office hours or a cost to travel to their representatives’ offices. Plus you can’t guarantee that you’ll be seen without making an appointment well in advance like AAM has done for our site visits on Tuesday. Social media, on the other hand, is much cheaper and easier to use in a pinch to reach your representatives. All of the major social media channels are completely free to use and you can use them anywhere you have WiFi, so if you only have a few minutes before bed to send your representatives an important message about an upcoming vote or something else of that nature, you could even send a post from the comfort of your pajamas via social media. Social media platforms can also be relatively simple to learn to use for advocacy, depending on your comfort level with them, and there’s usually someone nearby who is willing to help someone learn how to use it properly as well.
Time: 3:20 | 4:06
If you’re hooked on the idea of using social media for museum advocacy, the next question you might be asking yourself is: “should I use my personal social media networks to advocate for museums or is it ok to use my Museum’s Facebook/Twitter/Instagram to advocate?” The answer, of course, isn’t clear cut and depends on how your institution uses social media. It is definitely possible to use your institutional social media channels for advocacy if that fits how your institution uses social media. For example, I work at a very large and currently well-funded museum in a rather conservative part of New York State. For us, it can be very difficult to toe the line of sharing why museums deserve government funding when we seem very well-supported already and our local constituents tend to favor lower government spending. We tend not to be too overt in sharing why museums are important but highlight how we’re using specific grants. Institutions can make their calls for advocacy much more personal by sharing stories about or by people who are affected by programs the institutions host or services they provide. How has your institution changed one person’s life? Those kind of personal stories help potential advocates connect to you on a personal level and show, with facts, figures, and feelings, how important you are to the people you serve. Your museum should also share messages of gratitude when your supporters come to advocate for museums or when your congressional representatives vote for important museum initiatives or visit your institution. These public expressions of gratitude can be very important to both supporters and congressional representatives to see the importance of their work and encourage their future participation.
You can also use your personal social media networks for museum advocacy. This route is the one I prefer most since I have more freedom in terms what I share and how I can share it. While museums are the most trusted public source of information, people also trust the opinions of their peers highly. It’s why sites like Yelp are so popular and critical in terms of determining where people spend their time. It can mean a lot to your personal networks to see an advocacy message come from you as an individual as opposed to an institution that lacks a personal identity of its own. It’s also a great way to share how museums have personally impacted you or people you’re close to. For example, I like how to share how museums have been a safe place for me throughout my life as a place to explore new ideas and be myself. And just like using social media as an institution, you can share links and calls-to-action on your personal networks.
Time: 2:45 | 6:53
There are dozens of social media channels that are all constantly changing what types of media you can use, how many characters you can use, and if you can schedule posts or not. If it seems hard to follow the changes, don’t worry, it can also be difficult for social media professionals to keep track of what up-and-coming networks there are. Lucky for us, there are two major social media networks that are well-established and don’t seem to be disappearing any time soon that are also the two channels your representatives are most likely to be maintaining and monitoring.
Who here has a Facebook account? Most of us use our Facebook accounts as a personal social media channel to share updates about our lives with our family and friends across the globe. With comments and Facebook Messenger, we can make very personalized appeals to our family and friends to support museums. It’s also incredibly easy to use Facebook’s Share feature to share articles and links with those same networks. And very differently from Twitter, it can be difficult to hit Facebook’s character limit for an individual post.
Who here has a Twitter account? Who uses theirs for professional purposes? Personal purposes? It’s definitely more likely that if you have a Twitter account, you’re using it less as a way to keep family and friends updated and more as a way to expand your professional network. Twitter is geared more towards sharing short messages across a broad group of people. While Facebook also has hashtags, on Twitter, using hashtags is an essential way to discover new content and connect with people who share similar interests to you. With a 280 character limit including spaces between words, Twitter users definitely have to be more deliberate and intentional with their messages. Which can definitely be a good thing in terms of museums advocacy. With the amount of information that is tossed at people on a daily basis, a shorter message with a clear call-to-action is more likely to be responded to than a long, detailed explanation of why museums are important.
With that in mind, I’ll be spending the rest of this session focusing mostly on how to use Twitter for those of you who are unfamiliar with the platform and then share some social media advocacy tips that you could use on whichever social media platform you choose.
Time: 3:30 | 10:23
On the right, you’ll see a screenshot of what my personal Twitter profile looks like as an example of what you could. When setting up a Twitter account, it’s important to use your personal email as opposed to your work email, have a professional username that doesn’t have anything inappropriate in it and isn’t a long string of numbers. For example, I chose “amsterli” since it’s pretty close to my name and can easily be linked to me and it didn’t involve me adding a string of numbers to my username that is usually indicative of a spam account. In that spirit, it’s also important to have a professional-looking profile picture since spam accounts don’t have profile pictures typically and it allows people to know that you’re the person behind the Twitter account. If you have a professional headshot for work, I would recommend using it here. I don’t have one at the Museum, so I used a picture taken of me during my first week at the Museum.
If you’re using Twitter for advocacy, it’s a good idea to have your account be public instead of private. That way, people can see your tweets and learn more about museum advocacy. In your bio, add your job and any relevant users or hashtags. In my profile, I let myself be a little cheeky by calling myself @corningmuseum’s Tweeter-in-chief, but I also let people know right off the bat what’s important to me by including hashtags I frequently use and follow. You can also include a link to your organization’s website, like I’ve done, or not. You also don’t need to make your location or birthday publicly available as a way to keep some information private.
Another basic thing to remember about Twitter is that you can only use so many characters or photos in each tweet. 280 characters, 4 pictures, and 2:20 of video are Twitter’s current limits. Any link you post whether it’s a long link or a shortened one will count as 23 characters in your tweet.
Time: 2:12 | 12:35
Before we dig into how to tweet, let’s take a look at the anatomy of the Twitter home page, which will be the base for all of your Twitter activity. Your profile picture is located at the top left corner of your screen and when you click on it, it gives you access to your own profile and your Twitter settings. This is where you’ll adjust your privacy settings, change your profile picture, and do other account adjustments. In the opposite corner at the top of the screen is your Tweet button. This is where you’ll go to compose a Tweet from scratch and this is the feature that we’ll explore more in upcoming slides. Below that is your main feed. Much like with Facebook, the things that show up in your feed are Tweets by people you’re following on Twitter.
Twitter gives you a variety of ways to engage with the content from the people you’re following. The button on the bottom left of a Tweet allows you to reply to the person who tweeted. This creates a threaded reply, meaning that you can click into the tweet and see a conversation between the original poster and anyone else who has replied to this Tweet. Replies don’t appear directly on your profile unless someone chooses to look at your Tweets and Replies. The middle button allows you retweet or quote tweet this particular Tweet. Retweeting allows you to directly share the content as it appears on your profile with no additional comment. For example, with the Tweet we’re looking at, if I retweeted it, it would show up in my profile exactly as it does now, attributing content both to James Troy Smythe and Time. Quote tweeting allows you to add your own commentary to someone else’s content. It shows up in your profile just like this Tweet from James that shows the original content is by Time, but he added his own remarks to it. You can also send a tweet privately to someone using the direct message button on the bottom right of the Tweet.
At the bottom of the home screen, you have a button on the far left that allows you to come back to the screen you see now. The second button allows you to search for content on Twitter by using the @ symbol to find specific users, # for specific hashtags, or you can just type what you’re looking for. For example, museums advocacy as a search will bring up hashtags, users with that in their usernames or bios, or tweets that mention museums advocacy. The third button shows all of your notifications and the fourth button shows messages that users have sent directly to you.
Time: 3:40 | 16:15
So if you click the Tweet button in the upper right corner of your Twitter home screen, you’ll get a prompt to Tweet, which is the screenshot on the far left on this slide. You can type text and add links in the What’s Happening section next to your profile picture. You can either take pictures and videos with your camera using the camera box here or search your phone’s library for photos and videos here. You can tag users either in the Tweet text like I did with AAM in this sample Tweet or you can tag them in the photo which saves your character count. When you have your Tweet ready, you can click the blue Tweet button in the upper righthand corner. Make sure you’re 100% ready to Tweet because Twitter doesn’t allow you to edit your Tweets. If you find a spelling error or forgot to add something, you’ll have to delete your Tweet and try it again.
Time: 1:20 | 17:35
You can also add polls to Twitter by selecting the Tweet button and then the graph, which is the third button in on the bottom of your Tweet. Other ways to Tweet include searching for a hashtag. In this case, I search for museums advocacy and decided to quote tweet AAM’s tweet.
Time: 1:10 | 18:45
Photos and videos are a great way to make your social media posts pop and make them more fun to interact with. Most social media channels display content horizontally so when taking photos and videos for social media make sure to hold your phone or camera horizontally as well. Bright images and videos also work well since they stand out from other things in the feed and capture people’s attention. For video, you want to make sure that you keep it short and simple since most people will abandon a video within the first 10 seconds if it hasn’t captured their interest. For a great example of how to use video for museums advocacy on social media, I asked Museum Hack if they would let me use the video they shot last year on Julia’s iPhone between visits on Capitol Hill during last year’s Museums Advocacy Day. Play video. If you’re going to use photo and videos in your social media posts, make sure to take them before or after your visits and not during sessions or visits.
Time: 1:45 | 20:30
Here are some general tips to help guide your social media for museums advocacy. Do tweet regularly. Ideally you’ll post at least once or twice a week. Maintaining an account shows that you’re dedicated and that there’s a real person behind the screen. Remain respectful in all of your engagements with congressional representatives and museum advocates. Use social media as a platform to share great stories about your advocacy efforts, how your institutions positively impact the community around you, etc. Use photos and videos to help tell those stories and make your content stand out. Use social media to engage with other advocates or stay up-to-date about policy issues. Use social media to share resources as you find them.
Don’t share personally identifying information like your personal email or harmful content. Don’t send out twenty tweets tagging an account if it’s not relevant to them or get in arguments with trolls on the internet. Don’t use a million hashtags in your tweets. Usually one or two very specific hashtags do the trick of making sure that people see your content. Similarly, try to avoid using hashtags in the middle of tweets whenever possible or making a really long hashtag without each word of the tag being capitalized or share videos with audio that aren’t captioned. All of these tips help make your Tweets more accessible to Twitter users with handicaps.
Time: 2:30 | 25:00
Now that you’ve got a Twitter account set up, you might be asking yourself how to find people to follow. I’ve suggested a couple of hashtags and users here that would make a great start. #MuseumsAdvocacy and #MuseumsAdvocacy2018 are the two official hashtags AAM is using to talk about Museums Advocacy Day. If you search these tags, you’ll come across legions of fellow museum advocates and potential things to tweet about. #ITweetMuseums and #ArtsAdvocacy are both other great hashtags for people interested in museums.
I would definitely recommend following AAM @aamers for advocacy updates and IMLS. Museum Hack tweets a lot of great resources for museums and great museums advocacy tweets. Laura Lott, the head of AAM, is another great user to follow for museums advocacy. There are too many great Twitter users for museums advocacy and at the end of this presentation, I’ve included a link to my evergrowing list of Twitter users tweeting about museums advocacy.
Time: 2:15 | 27:15
I wanted to take some time to look at some examples of social media posts about museums advocacy as a way to show you what good advocacy looks like and as a way to get you thinking about what kinds of things you might want to share on social media for museums advocacy. On the left, I used one of my Tweets from last year’s Museums Advocacy Day. When the NY contingent of museums advocates visited Senator Chuck Schumer’s office, we were lucky enough to pose with him for a group photo. One of his staffers was kind enough to snap this photo on my phone which I tweeted out, thanking Senator Schumer for meeting with us and for his support. I also tagged his official Twitter account as well as AAM so they could share my tweet with their own networks.
The tweet from IMLS on the right also does a great job of using an image to tell a story about museums and using Twitter’s limited character count to share an important fact about the impact of museums.
Time: 1:15 | 26:15
I also really like this post-Museums Advocacy Day tweet from the Mutter Museum. They started the thread with an image and an acknowledgement of how IMLS and NEH helped them fund an important exhibit. Pennsylvania’s museum association followed up on this tweet asking for other Pennsylvania museums to share how they’re impacted by these important governmental funding agencies. SFMOMA also had a great tweet thanking their rep for signing last year’s Office of Museum Services letter. Both of these tweets do a great job of thanking people and organizations for their help and keeping museums advocacy on the mind of their followers throughout the year.
Time: 1:30 | 27:15
I also wanted to look at some of AAM’s museums advocacy resources to see how you can repurpose that content to make great social media posts. I particularly like using their state snapshots, which show how much your state received from NEA, NEH, and IMLS both directly and through regranting agencies over a three year time period. These infographics pack a lot of information into a small place and are aesthetically pleasing. I also like taking parts of AAM’s Museums Fact Sheet to repurpose into tweets.
Time: 1:20 | 29:05
While I was putting this presentation together, President Trump announced his intention to further cut NEA, NEH, and IMLS’ budgets for the 2019 federal budget, which unfortunately, gave me a great chance to show you how you can use AAM’s resources to compose social media posts about museums advocacy. I used the NYS state snapshot as a graphic to accompany a tweet that talked about how this proposed cut will negatively affect NYS museums. I used a section of the Museum Fact Sheet to show the economic impact of museums.
You can definitely use the resources around you to compose great social media posts or you can come up with creative ways to share your advocacy message.
Time: 1:20 | 30:25
I could probably go on for another hour or so sharing my favorite examples and giving you more ways to use social media for advocacy, but I want to make sure we have enough time for questions, so here are some important museum advocacy resources you can use on social media. The first is the list AAM has compiled of congressional representatives’ offices, phone numbers, and social media accounts. You can post directly to these pages or mention them in any of your social media museums advocacy posts. The second is AAM’s Museums Do That video which is great to share on social media to show people what museums can do for them. The third is AAM’s publicity toolkit that gives further tips and ideas for publicizing your involvement in museums advocacy. The fourth is Museum Hack’s round up of tweets from last year’s Museums Advocacy Day which hopefully will give you even more ideas of what you could post about. Finally, I put up my Twitter list of museum advocates for more museums advocacy social media examples and a way to connect to your fellow advocates.
Time: 2:00 | 32:25
You can reach me with any questions on Twitter at amsterli, email me at sterlingal@cmog.org, or catch me whenever you see me. I’d be more than happy to draft content with you or give tutorials for anything that I didn’t have a chance to go over. Does anyone have questions for me before this session ends?
Answer questions
Thank you everyone for your time and coming to Washington to advocate for museums. Good luck with your visits on Tuesday!
Time: 1:30 | 33:55 | plenty of time for questions
